Love Is All: Two Thousand And Ten Injuries
In music, slaphappy joy can be hard to make stick. Bands run the risk of sounding overly glee-clubby, scarily cult-like, or just plain sloppy. But cheer without being over-cutesy is something that Swedish indie-poppers in Love Is All do quite well. They kick off their third album with “Bigger Bolder,” and while its jumpy organ and skittering drums initially seem scrawny, the band’s confidence just grows by the bar, especially once a saxophone joins in. Singer Josephine Olausson goes in for high-pitched finishing notes, but sparingly, and the band’s arrangements are earthbound even when giddy: the plinky stop-start rhythm riffs of “Repetition” grind more than glide, for instance, and so does the charging new wave “Early Warnings.” In a time when lots of modern rock bands are showing off their breadth, Love Is All has sneakily become notably, and skillfully, diverse: The gleaming guitar crescendo of “Never Now” is realized as fully as the punk-dub groove of “False Pretense” (which borrows from Swiss post-punk legends Liliput’s “Die Matrosen”). No wonder they’re so giddy.