Album Review : The Tough Alliance - The New School
- Written by Stef Siepel
Actually, this album is from 2005. Which is a good four years ago, yes it is, and actually the first album of Swedish electronic duo The Tough Alliance. The album, called The New School, was made by Eric Berglund and Henning Furst, who since then have released two further albums, the most recent one in 2007 called A New Chance. Their most recent work is last years Neo Violence EP. This album, The New School, is being geared up for a re-release however, giving everyone the chance to acquaint themselves with the earliest work of these Scandinavians. I did mention they swing baseball bats on stage, didn't I? No? Well, there you go.
The introduction track, 'Tough II', is mostly instrumentally driven and gives a bit of a club vibe. Pretty dancey, nice build-up, and the vocals that are part of it are distant and I reckon a bit patched up. The track smoothly converts into the percussion led 'The New School', on which a bit of that club vibe is rubbed off, probably mostly because of the percussion. It does slow down a bit throughout the song, when the two Scandinavians ask us to break the rules (as that is what they are for). The song works best when the percussion is there to pull it along. After this track, however, the club feeling is lost a bit. It seems that from that point on they are intent on finding the perfect summer jam but unfortunately they seem to fall a bit short on every try, for different reasons.
This is too bad, surely, as they do show the potential of making good songs. The percussion bits in 'The New School' are particularly ace, and they know how to work their instrumentals. It is a bit of a wonderment therefore that most of the tracks seem to go absolutely nowhere. 'In The Kitchen', the track immediately following 'The New School', seems to be a prime example of that. It just dawdles through its running time with no build-up or chorus, which would have been okay if there was a bit of a beat, but it just slowly crawls forward. 'Make It Happen' ditto. It bobs along in a sort of mid-pace which really does seem to fall short a bit. "And if someone tries to disturb this groove" they sing, but the groove seems absent already. Perhaps drug-induced, that is perhaps the pace it suits. When not on drugs you perhaps would like to feel a bit more action in the build-up of the songs. The lads can provide it, but on this album they are perhaps too inconsistent with that.
Some tracks do however project the summery feel they aim for, like for example 'My Hood', which is aided tremendously by the chorus and the two different vocals. Now there is a slight other point though, and that is that in songs where they have succeeded in getting the right vibe, sometimes the lyrics are just a bit off-putting. I'm not asking for Keats or James Joyce, surely not if the beat is up for it, but if you give it a summery jam feel one likes to perhaps sing along a tad. And so you arrive at 'Koka-Kola Veins', which perhaps is indeed a pondering on the current coca-cola and television society (couch potato extraordinaire), but though catchy and perhaps with subject, the chorus does go "bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla". Don't ask me which linguistic bit is responsible for it, but the "b" in front of the "la" makes it a tad embarrassing to sing along to, where "la" would have been perfectly fine. If it seems nit-picking, perhaps, but it just feels a bit against nature to put that "b" in front of it while singing. Also I do want to note that however an attack on coach-potatoism (or whatever) is a subject, a subject does not alone make poetry. The best track perhaps is 'Holiday', where they don't undermine the feel-good vibe with something too embarrassing.
The behemoth track 'Babylon', counting six minutes, again suffers from a lack of build-up, which does seem a recurring theme on this album. Maybe the close but no cigar theme is also evident on 'Keep it Pure', where you do have the main vocal and then the other guy singing "catchy lines", and you do have a chorus that should have a bouncy feel. Unfortunately it fails to pull the right strings just, and for some reason both voices sound nasal and do grate a bit on this song. Though throughout the songs you do feel that The Tough Alliance can summon the individual components for a good song, they might just want to mix them, which they do not do on this album. Especially the absence of good build-ups hurts them on this album, which too often seems to go nowhere.