The Lost Poets

Despite the insistence of real estate agents everywhere, location is not always everything. The days of styles and genres living in small, isolated pockets are long gone. Environment does do a lot to shape ones sound but nowadays with all the sound waves flying through firewires, everyone is exposed to everything and artists latch on to whatever moves them. I was recently turned on to Laika & the Cosmonauts (I know I'm way late to the party here). They craft brilliant warm and breezy surf rock and they hail from sunny....Finland. From the sound of The Lost Poets, you'd think they must have been tearing up the desert in convertibles since before they were old enough to drive but the duo come from snowy Stockholm, Sweden. The pull to the the Golden Coast must have been strong as the duo packed up and moved to sunny L.A. and have released their second full length offering, Insubordia Part ll.

The album's opening and title track is straight forward desert rock. Guitars all riff in unison, tom filled verses bring to mind barren stretches of sand dusted highway. David Rosengren's vocals soar in saturated delay like Perry Ferrell. All cylinders are firing. The second offering and lead single, 'Danny Electro' brings to mind another group of nineties monarchs as Rosengren seems to do his best Chris Cornell impression.

'Bound' and 'Mouth' break out of the grunge archetype. Sullen acoustic guitar and voice-on-the-wind electronics give the riff rock a cinematic twist. The mid album segue, 'Beyond Redemption' features a spine-tingling piano and more ghost and ghoul wails. Danny Elfman with the jaunty-ness dialed back.

From there, the album progressively slows down, 'In Filth' distinctively feels like trudging through trenches. This is where The Lost Poets really explore interesting new ground, taking grunge to its naturally sludgey conclusion. The final cuts are contemplative and stark.

Insubordia Part ll isn't breaking any major new ground. The songs are firmly entrenched in nineties grunge ethos. For those of us who have well worn copies of every Soundgarden and Alice In Chains record, who believe that music has never been as poignant as it was some 20-25 years ago, these songs offer the genre a new life. A reimagining in the twenty first century. The planet may have changed but the basics remain the same.