Ecovillage: "Summer of Love"

Chopped-up drum machine? Check. Neon keyboards? Check. Flowery forthcoming album title? Check. Ecovillage must be back and for the second time this year, refusing to curb their LSD habit as they ready their sophomore album. Like “Amadeu I” before it, new single “Summer of Love” sticks firmly to the acid/rain dance formula, with Emil Holmström and Peter Wikström both bringing new ideas in from solo projects. In this case, the new idea’s a saxophone, and as the duo brew up more natural hallucinogens and pop music, you get a good idea of what life must be like on the mean streets of Umeå: opera capital of northern Sweden, and home of psychoactive mushrooms that cause more brain damage than Dolph Lundgren.

“Summer of Love” begins by presenting the strings and shimmering synths the band have forged their sound with, and as soon as those are established—and with a full three minutes to go—they break out the guest brass transposer. The melody that comes from it is jazzy, delirious, like someone’s allowed an Easy Listenin’ tent into the mental festival in their heads. Luckily the accompaniment fits, carried by what must be their most comprehensible lyrics to date, miles away from diced boyband vocals: “Feels like summer love / You know I’m dreaming / Dreaming of you,” sighs an anonymous diva, banging at natural wooden drums. It’s the bangs which prevent the track from dipping into chill-out, the grunting bass adding an air of forest canopy porn film. Like all Ecovillage singles it eventually fades into nature, vanishing into shallow waves like newly hatched turtles, and as “Summer” breaks off you get the sense of ambient musicians maturing: the Orb, with combed hair. An ironic song title given the current Scandinavian tragedies; a pleasant enough musical pick-me-up for anyone suffering from a shit July.