duggup

Artist: Billie The Vision and the Dancers
Website: www.myspace.com/billiethevisionandthedancers or http://www.billiethevision.com/music.php
Track Name: A Man From Argentina
Playback: mp3/flash
Download?: Yes

This is another of those bands that when you hear the name, you have to go and have a look (well I do… its how I found Flowers From The Man Who Shot Your Cousin, which is another great name). any way I was doodling around in Last.FM and this delicate, naive acoustic guitar tumbled into the headphones, by the time singer Lars Lindquists finished the first line I was hooked (and downloading it to the long suffering MP3 player).

Now this is not just another pop band singing “simple songs of hope and joy”, just below the surface and there are some interesting observations and some of the protaganists confusion and pathos is genuinely touching and then just as it reaches the point where it would start being glaringly obviously serious, the trumpet kicks in and we get the happy ending… or are we left filling in the blanks in our heads.

So time a little history…

Billie the Vision and the Dancers got together in Malmö during the recordings of the first album in the spring of 2004. The songwriter and singer Lars Lindquists had some songs for a solo project. But one person wasn’t enough, he thought, and had in short persuaded five more members to the project. Most of them old friends from his home town Bräkne-Hoby in Blekinge, and on top of that a new friend from Borlänge.

The debut I Was So Unpopular in School and Now They´re Giving Me This Beautiful Bicycle released on their own label Love Will Pay the Bills got great reviews in the press and also got nominated at Manifest, the Swedish prize award for records released on indie labels.

Live “A Man From Argentina”…

What really impresses me (apart from the lkiller lyrics and great music) is that Billie is another band that has made killer live performace and the internet their way of staying independent. They have sold 6000 albums, 600 000 downloads from their own web site and over 100 gigs, they are still booking their own gigs and added a distribution collaboration with Border Music for the latest album

Billie the Vision and the Dancers have a couple of times discussed collaborations with some of the big record companies, but so far they haven’t got an offer worth wasting the dream to become the greatest indieband in the world. “Indiepop is not a genre”, Lars says. “I think of it as a way to relate to the music industry. It’s all about being independent, to be able to make the crucial decisions yourself. And that is more important to us than we first thought.”

So as the line in “A Man From Argentina” says, shake your hips at the revolution and be naive again. No I don’t know what it means it just makes me feel good.

Highly Recommended