What does it mean to be Blue As In Bliss? It’s a sentiment that feels welcoming but mostly in a nostalgic sense. Blue, in a blissful sense is about being sad, accepting the parts of life where we are most jaded but also kind of running with it in a positive way. This heavy handed way of looking at the world through foggy blue glasses is the very center of The Tarantula Waltz‘s new album of the same name. Today, we talk two of the tracks off of that album,
Blue As Bliss is a mix of a few different sounds. On one hand, there’s classic folk music, we become familiar Markus Svensson’s pure vocals and delicate folk guitar fingerpicking. (See “Golden Chain” above, where he also mentions Leonard Cohen in a very interesting way.) On another there’s psych rock: the guitar pushes further and becomes noisy and distorted, their is also some synth work. Finally, and most notably, Svensson plays with experimentation and sampling.
Opening with a track called “MDMA By the Sea” we are immediately submerged in Svensson’s jaded M.O. Svensson used to think the best parts of life was doing MDMA by the sea. He ponders his existence and wonders what is actually good in life. Using drugs as an anchoring point for talking about sadness in male fronted psych rock risks being dangerously trite, but it does a lovely job at capturing the breadth of Svensson’s ability as a singer.
