Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman has a fantastic tumble of red hair, pale pink cheeks and looks every inch the particular kind of girl singer that makes a particular kind of 20 to 30-something male weak at the knees. Indeed, a senior music industry representative in the audience is so besotted he is drawing her, painstakingly, in a large notebook. There are 10 Concretes on stage, and one plays the glockenspiel, an instrument currently de rigeur in the indie world. They are Swedish and so uniformly, disconcertingly good-looking.
Bergsman has the kind of voice that's generated with little facial expression, a giddy-little-girl gurgle; like Harriet Wheeler from the Sundays but with thicker ankles. Though much compared to the Velvet Underground (New Friend joins a long list of songs that sound a bit like Pale Blue Eyes, but that's it), the Concretes actually occupy territory somewhere between Mazzy Star, the Sundays and the Cardigans. They give that impression a lot of Scandinavian bands do - of having formed from the flotsam in a storm drain beneath mainstream Western culture, a confection of echoes of familiar things.
They're at their best when Bergsman's arresting but limited voice is given room to breathe. Thrown against the teeth-gratingly jaunty stomp of Seems Fine - an instant flashback to the indie charts of 1986 - it's just so much yelping. Unfurling among the spacious chiming guitar and mariachi trumpet of Forces, however, it's delightful.
This is the kind of music you feel awful being beastly about: it's unequivocally nice, and after a while the niceness begins to drag a little. The Sundays have a bewitching otherness; the Cardigans have pop smarts and supreme songcraft; Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval surfs the ennui with a unique mixture of froideur and sensual languor. Unfortunately, when Bergsman sings "if you want my lovin' darlin" it's hard not to feel that these songs struggle to be more than polite exercises in genre.
There's the germ of something here, but it needs to learn to court extremes. Bergsman, lips barely moving, needs to cut free and soar.
