Review - Dungen: 4

Originally published in Soundcheck Magazine (10/28/08)

I have a friend who uses a porcelain sculpture of a woman carrying a basket to hold his roach clips and who lights up Led Zeppelin-brand incense in his room. Needless to say, this friend would love Dungen’s new album, 4. But what about the rest of us?

The question is relevant because, up until this point, Dungen’s albums were dynamic enough to garner interest from many different standpoints despite the ease of labeling their sound as simply “vintage rock.” It always was a term of affection, though. Unlike other bands, who simply want to be their heroes, Dungen embodies all that is good about 1960s and 1970s psychedelic rock. In short, Dungen mastermind Gustav Ejstes is, above all, an unfortunate victim of time.

It doesn’t even seem logical that, in an age where a DJ simply can change the hairdo of an old classic and write it off as new and see success, something with the breadth and detail of Dungen’s psycho-jazz symphonies still has appeal. So far, they do. But this latest Dungen release is a bit different.

Consider the “Intro” track on 2007’s Tio Bitar: it is a terrific microburst of psychedelic madness and searing electric soloing, but it isn’t really a song as much as a brief detour. Not like the epic “Mon Amour”, a specimen that lived, breathed and died in a near-nine minute span. On 4, there are lots of “Intros” and not enough “Mon Amours”. Both the good and bad ideas on this album are never really fleshed out into substantial material. More often than not, they fade out prematurely, as though Ejstes couldn’t really think of where to take them next.

Instead of expanding his already-huge musical imagination, Ejstes fills out his album with spots of wholly irrelevant smooth jazz. And on the grand wavelength of bad-to-good jazz music, Dungen’s departures are maddeningly closer to Kenny G wankery than John Coltrane grace. Where are the beautiful Middle Eastern vistas such as “C Visar Vägen” or the unpredictable ventures of 2004’s Ta Det Lugnt’s title track?

They are there somewhere, hidden in the much-better second half of the album – buried in the piano-trot of “Fredag” and acoustic-electric harmony of “Mina Damer Och Fasaner”. But after two fantastic albums, expectations are far too high to let this spotty release go without a slight sigh of disappointment.

– Andy Pareti