Love Is All

This Swedish quintet's debut (out in Europe for nearly a year) jettisons any remaining pretensions of '80s DayGlo new-wave reinterpretations, rediscovering the perk that was the saving grace of the assymetrically coiffed. Songs like "Busy Doing Nothing" and "Aging Had Never Been His Friend" ring with chirpy guitars and blurty sax that recall Haircut 100 as much as X-Ray Spex on disco bennies.

More than with most (Radio 4, Rapture, Fischerspooner), it takes the inherent silliness of folks from a land whose radio dials have long been supersaturated with gawdawful shmaltz to have no problem admitting a direct line between, say, Haircut 100 and X-Ray Spex, and yet somehow sound musically astute doing it. There's not much in the way of de rigueur remixes or even synths for that matter, and yet this is the new-wave dance party that's been hoped for from the whole revival, to which it arrived late. Then again, with the cascading drums and ascending chants of "Make Outfall Make Up," the warped '60s "bop-ba-baa" backup vocals of "Spinning & Scratching," as well as the overall slapdash rush of the production -- well, it doesn't have to be a revival.