The Soundtrack of Our Lives | Welcome to the Infant Freebase



Album of the week: Week 4, 2018

From the first power-chords of the opening song Mantra Slider to the last melodic strums of the closing Legend In His Own Mind, Welcome to the Infant Freebase is nothing short of a brave statement. It's a state of the union. It's brilliant. It was the debut album from the Gothenburg band The Soundtrack of Our Lives.

The band who arose from the ashes of the legendary Union Carbide Productions initially went in the studio with a plan of making a 50-song box-set for their debut. Or at least, so the story goes. It probably wasn't to far from the truth. Welcome to the Infant Freebase is a eclectic journey of 20 songs. The EP Homo Habilus Blues was released around the same time. The songs on the EP was even included on the vinyl version of the album. Add some of the b-sides from the singles and probably quite a few of the songs on sophomore album, Extended Revelations, and you are pretty close to 50 songs. Don't say that these guys didn't go all the way.

Most of the songs on the album were written by Ebbot Lundberg and Björn Olsson, both from Union Carbide Productions, and now living legends. You can say that the band and the songwriters certainly wore their inspirations on their sleeves. It's not hard to point at this song and hear The Rolling Stones, point at that song and hear The Kinks and then point at this other song and hear some early Pink Floyd. And what about The Stooges? Well, yeah, they're all in there - but you are never in doubt about which band you're really listening to. That Soundtrack of Our Lives-sound is set in stone from the get-go.

I've been living with this album again this last week and I've fallen in love with it all over again. It's playful, it's full of energy and it's amazingly good to be such a long and diverse album. I wouldn't have taken any of these tunes of the album, and that's coming from a guy who thinks an album that's dragging on beyond 35 minutes are stretching it..

My favourite songs on the album are Instant Repeater '99Grand Canaria, Embryonic Rendezvous, Confrontation Camp, Endless SongBlow My Cool and Legend in His Own Mind. I could probably have listed each and every song actually.

"Take a trip in an endless song
Speak the colour and it won't take long
Diver down to a deeper sound
Yeah, take the trip to where you once belonged"


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