The Tough Alliance

Consisting of youth close friends Henning Fürst and Eric Berglund, Göthenburg duo the Rough Alliance — often described simply seeing that TTA — honed their particular mixture of pop, electronica, dub, and Caribbean affects through some EP and record releases in the locally based Program label (also house to Jens Lekman and Studio), before forming their own label, Sincerely Yours, in 2006, which helped to determine them being a central drive inside the Swedish indie music picture. First produced in 2003, they debuted the next year using the MAKE IT WORK EP, offering the anthemic synth pop name tune, a cover of 50 Cent’s “A LOT OF MEN,” and “Consider No Heroes,” a move contact of their affects that begins with Snow Cube, Brian Wilson, and Jackie Wilson and proceeds via an idiosyncratic smorgasbord of punk, spirit, reggae, Britpop, and rap symbols that, as a whole, provide an approximate (though barely coherent) indicator of TTA’s general visual. The same year’s minor Holiday EP announced their allegiance to twee having a cover (and gender-shifting retitling) of Primal Scream’s “Velocity Woman,” most widely known as the starting tabs on the fabled C86 cassette, while their first full-length, 2005’s THE BRAND NEW College, was a triumph of sunlit synth-driven pop with sly digital perversions. 2006’s New Waves EP — the group’s 1st release independently Sincerely Yours label — adopted suit, specially the infectious, tropical-flavored “Silly Offences,” though their following launch, a limited-edition LP entitled Escaping Your Ambitions, was a tiny detour, a nautical-themed recording of ambient, albeit melodic, electronica. Through the label, which also produces information by like-minded performers Air flow France, the Honeydrips, and Jonas Video game, and whose Internet site assigns a catalog quantity not merely to actual produces, but also to every music video, MP3 post, blog page entry, and exclusive, limited-run content of clothes or other products (including spray-paint stencils), the Difficult Alliance cultivate a childlike visual of basic beauty, travel, and exploration (including regular maritime motifs) and, obviously, sincerity. Relatively at chances with this picture (though perhaps simply demonstrating another type of “childishness”), their flippantly audacious live shows — which occasionally are the duo lip-synching to pre-recorded music and swinging football bats on-stage — task a devil-may-care disposition which has led to accusations of glorifying assault and hooliganism (not really unrelated with their like for and self-conscious appropriation of hip-hop tradition). The Difficult Alliance possess protested these statements, addressing them straight in the music “Neo-Violence” (“Truly sorry, believed you’d obtain the wink/It’s inside our nature to become out of synch”), using their superbly summery third record, A New Possibility, which reached amount 13 over the Swedish record charts. They started attracting greater worldwide interest in 2007, because of outstanding reviews for this record and its business lead single, “HIGH GRADE Riot,” aswell as the initial American distribution of a few of their catalog through the summertime Fans Unlimited label.