OTR: The Cardigans - Gran Turismo

"Oh great," I thought, after typing in 'cardigans.net,' the URL printed on the CD sleeve of Gran Turismo, "another band who has lost control of their domain name." However, a quick jump to the all-knowing Google soon set me on the right track. While The Cardigans' website may have been hosted on a .net domain back in 1998, sometime between then and now they graduated to .com.

In any case, up until joi_division handed me a spare promo copy of Gran Turismo she had lying around sometime in the past ten years, my only exposure of The Cardigans had been via "Lovefool," a song so overexposed in 1996 thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack to Romeo + Juliet that any passing interest I had in the band quickly evaporated. As a teenager I wasn't interested in subversive pop songs with dark undertones - I wanted straightforward, in your face darkness. As such, Garbage's "#1 Crush" was far more appealing to me.

Well, you can't always accurately judge a book by its cover nor a band by which songs make the Billboard Charts. When it comes to in your face, straightforward darkness (or at least melancholy), Gran Turismo has it in spades. This disc rarely strays into any tempo which could be considered anything more than moderately upbeat with a sonic palette akin to Garbage meets Everything But The Girl. The intro to "Higher" sounds like they are about to turn into Massive Attack - at least until they get a few bars in.

The Cardigans released a "Best of" compilation in 2008. Of the 22 tracks on the disc, four from Gran Turismo were included: "My Favourite Game," "Erase/Rewind," "Hanging Around" and "Higher." They had a string of hit singles in Europe, but it seems that "Lovefool" damned them in the United States. I guess only Abba and Ace Of Base are the only Swedish bands allowed to have multiple hits on the North American continent.

Then again, what's the point of having a "hit" these days anyhow?