WAY TO DROP THE BALL, SWEDEN

I remember a time – seems like it wasn’t all that long ago, really – when Vince and I were pretty much convinced that they just put special drugs in the water in Sweden to help the human brain devise awesome metal. That country could do no wrong. We often spoke of taking a pilgrimage to Gothenburg, where we assumed that every garage would be full of kids in the earliest stages of becoming the next At the Gates, the next Dark Tranquillity, the next In Flames.

It’s good to be young and naive, but everyone eventually has to face the fact that the romantic ideals we so cling to as children must fall away as we enter adulthood. When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but then I grew the fuck up. Or however that quote goes.

And if you don’t agree with my stance on Sweden, then you haven’t seen the new Sonic Syndicate video.

Holy crap. Everything about that video is terrible. I don’t even care that the girl is cute, ’cause her taste in music is so awful I can’t imagine what our pillow-talk would be about. (“You like the color black? I like the color black, too.”) Even just sticking mics in the singers’ hands would have been a step in the right direction, ’cause then their arms wouldn’t have been free to do those big New Kids on the Block movements. Another thing that would have been a step in the right direction: making a video with a different band for a different song.

And in case Sonic Syndicate alone don’t make you wish Sweden had some brown people so we could declare war on them right now, there’s Audiovision:

Granted, Audiovision don’t seem to be influenced by their fellow countrymen so much as they do by some desire to make the listener wish he’d been aborted as a fetus, but, still, it’s not like the Swedish government deported them and made a statement disavowing them – which would have been the classy move.

Also, if God is on Audiovision’s side, then please send me directly to Hell. Thanks.

-AR