Jeg elsker Anna.

God, just couldn’t wait. Hello Saferide is all over the news lately. Of course, her new album, More Modern Short Stories from Hello Saferide, will be out 24. September. The first single, Anna, was released about a week ago, and is now available for free via myspace -- or, on second thought, why don’t I just make it easier, allow you to avoid myspace entirely, and put it up here?

The new single earned a nice write-up on Pitchfork (reinforcing my belief that Marc Hogan is actually the only person who writes for Pitchfork; seriously, at least 95 percent of everything I’ve read on there was written by him), and has also been featured on a bunch of blogs… And now there’s a wonderful video, the saddest video in the world.

For a less-sad video, there is also a live one of Arjeplog, available on PSL. The write-up there is in Swedish, and since I miss translations, I translated it all. I did the last paragraph myself, because it had the most words I already knew, and then I sort of cheated and used google translator for the first part. Of course, google translator, while very useful, is not very good at grammar and sentence structure and things, and it also misses compound words quite a lot, so I still had to go in and fix more than half of it anyway. Well, I pretty much re-translated the whole thing. But it was fun.

Anyway. The wording here is still at times a little awkward, but now it at least all makes sense. And so, for those non-Swedish-reading devotees of Hello Saferide, here is a translation of the PSL write-up, in the good English that you can read:

/ Music With: Hello Saferide

We are very proud; today this will premier on ‘Music With.’

It is wise to prepare to expect no handclaps and hardly any acoustic guitars on the upcoming record, Hello Saferide let be known a few weeks ago. And certainly ‘More Modern Short Stories from Hello Saferide’ sounds more subdued and bleak than her debut. The shape of the sound is harder and one can clearly hear that it is the master Andreas Mattsson as the producer.

Annika Norlin wanted us to see each other in a church or in a churchyard. It was the latter. Therefore, yesterday we met in the forest churchyard (Skogskyrkogården) outside Stockholm to play in a PSL version of the new album’s last song, Arjeplog, a tune she wrote after she lived in, er… Arjeplog [it’s a little town in northern Sweden] for two weeks last spring. What did she do there? Got her driver’s license, of course.

It’s cute, and, while it’s not quite Anna, I do like the song. I also like that at one point, you can hear birds chirping in the background.

Finally, you can pre-order the new CD via Bengan’s. (No word yet on whether there will be vinyl.) As I understand it, pre-ordering will ensure that the album arrives at your home on release day. Which is less than three weeks away. OH MY GOD.

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After a bit of quiet, Sincerely Yours put out a few new things last week. I’m beginning to get their pattern -- nothing, and then a whole bunch. It works.

Anyway -- a new Air France video, to go with the song Collapsing at Your Doorstep, from their most recent album. I never thought I’d contentedly spend four and a half minutes watching windmills, but I did. Normally I’m not a video person, but this is strangely good, in, as SY writes, a mesmerizing way.

Also out is a new three-track single from Nordpolen. The actual single, Vem Har Sagt, can now be streamed on myspace. If you have the patience to do so in thirty-second clips, the other two tracks can also be streamed through artful manipulation of the preview function at Klicktrack. Of course, you can also buy them.

What I’ve heard sounds like other stuff I’ve heard by Nordpolen, and like other stuff that has come out on Sincerely Yours. (Except that he sings in Swedish.) Good sound.

There is also a Nordpolen T-shirt. I find the design (look at it) very attractive. If more things in the world looked like this, I would be very happy. Of course, I don’t really wear T-shirts any more, and even if I did, with the current exchange rate, while Warren Buffet might be able to afford to buy things from Sweden, I certainly can’t. You would think IKEA could afford to pay me more…

--DL--
Anna (Hello Saferide)