Swedish Hitz Goes Metal

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Doolitte Group
Produced by Tommy Johansson

Everyone has seen albums like this. The type of CD album only found at discount music racks at garages and service stations. A CD for a small amount of cash that contains a bunch of nameless session musicians pumping twenty of the most famous hits of the time, with a nasty, cheap looking cover made in a free computer graphics package in about fifteen minutes. Something a bored parent might buy for their kids to shut them up before going on a long road trip, and then chucked in the bin when the journey is over. There’s hundreds of CDs just like that, and given the huge popularity of heavy metal in Sweden, it was perhaps inevitable that some bright spark would conceive such a compilation but with a generic metal band playing well known pop songs instead.

And so Swedish Hitz Goes Metal was born, a collection of hit songs by Swedish acts recorded by Tommy Johansson, founder of ReinXeed, and commissioned by Doolittle Group label boss Christian Liljegren (Narnia vocalist), with all the potential to be one of the most glorious car-wrecks in recent history.

Let’s get to the first, and most pedantic criticism out the way: this is not a metal album covering Swedish hits. This is a metal album covering the hit singles of three particular acts: Abba, Roxette and Ace of Base. Fair enough, if you think of famous Swedish pop music, then these three bands pretty much cover the lion’s share of hit songs available. One does wonder if perhaps this should have just been an Abba covers album, or maybe a series of cover albums for each band – no, wait, bad idea, that’d mean more of these horrible things. Either way, other successful pop acts from Sweden are ignored – no Cardigans, no Robyn, no September, no Basshunter and no Europe (because, really, it doesn’t get more pop than The Final Countdown). Not even some Rednex. Hearts bleed at what might have been.

Said acts got off lightly though, it seems. Tommy’s band are actually pretty good at playing their instruments, and he himself is actually pretty good at playing lead guitar. There’s no complaints in that regard at all – they are a perfectly acceptable collection of power metal session musicians. The same can’t be said for Tommy’s singing. Imagine the most painful power metal singing, crossed with that odd Swedish tone, blended into at least two auto-tuners (whether such things are used or not is irrelevant, that’s what it sounds like, even when the singing is out of tune). Then imagine said voice, as heartless and mechanical it must sound, trying to perform famous songs intended to be sung by genuinely capable female singers.

Now marry said voice with a clean, but really cheap sounding production. The aural equivalent of plastic. Imagine that voice multiplied to create chorused backing vocals, as happens on the album’s opening gambit, Mamma Mia. Assume the band, as capable as they might be, rushing through working out how to perform songs of very different genres and making lousy, uninspired versions of it. This is how the album sounds – a quickly made and manufactured record produced to capture an obvious market, and make a quick krona.

The majority of this album is torturing Abba songs. Of the fourteen song track listing, seven of these are Abba songs, which should hardly come as a surprise. It is however unfortunate, since many of the songs chosen have already been covered elsewhere – often very successfully. It’s the knowledge of excellent renditions of Summernight City by Therion, or Lay All Your Love On Me by Avantasia that make the versions here seem all the more worse. As annoyingly twee and sweet as the music of Abba normally is, it seems to be magnified here, if that can even be imagined. Super Trouper is an annoying song in its original form – here it is laughably bad, so hilariously hammed up yet straight-faced, not aware of exactly how bad it actually is. Then there’s Money Money Money (released as a video single, no less), where Tommy decides to practically ram the chorus down the microphone, regardless of how out of tune he might be. Thank heavens they didn’t think to do Fernando.

Soft rock duo Roxette suffer a little less – perhaps because Tommy’s voice isn’t so bad at imitating the band’s male vocals. As a result, their version of The Look is almost passable. Sadly Joyride really isn’t, since Tommy now has to sing choruses that the band’s female singer would sing. As for Listen To Your Heart, given that the original was a pretty horrible ballad, a horribly bad power metal version of said song was really not required.

It is the Ace of Base songs that suffer the most from this treatment, though. The Sign starts well enough, but as the vocals come in it quickly becomes cringe-worthy, because the auto-tuners seem to go into utter overkill for the song’s surprisingly difficult chorus. All That She Wants suffers even worse – evidentially, eurodisco with a bit of a reggae groove was not meant to be translated into third-rate power metal. But given that the song is sang with a fairly low voice, to suddenly give it this kind of high-pitched power metal delivery just seems inappropriate. These versions might give you a new found respect for Ace of Base’s original versions – and that in itself is a very worrying concept.

“I thought it was about time to hear the songs in the way they should have sounded from the beginning,” states Tommy in the band’s press release. No, these songs really should never have sounded like this, which is really saying something given some of the source material. However, one thing can be said for this collection of atrocity – it’s so bad, it almost becomes good again. That’s perhaps the best thing that can be said for it. Recommended buying? Hell no. But it could be worth a giggle to check it out regardless, if only to mock it relentlessly.

“ hilariously hammed up yet straight-faced ”

Tracklist: Mamma Mia / The Look / Money Money Money / The Sign / Summer Night City / All That She Wants / Super Trouper / Joyride / Intermezzo No. 1 / Sleeping in my Car / The Winner Takes it All / Beautiful Life / Lay All Your Love on Me / Listen to your Heart

Written by James Donovan
More: 2011, Power Metal, Tribute Albums, Various