Big-City Folk Rock - dark, honest and uncompromising songs delivered with folk rock roots and an underground edge.

12 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Folk Rock, ROCK: 70's Rock



Details:
In the late eighties Stellan Wahlström toured Europe and the USA with the garage rock band The Wylde Mammoths, releasing records on the legendary Crypt Records label. He was also in The High Speed V, another wild rock combo coming out of that same scene. He is now out of the garage and with his new band he is doing what could be described as modern big-city folk rock, a kind of slow and somber rock with singer/songwriter roots. Or as The Big Takeover put it, "a more sophisticated take on a cross between post-Velvets and Alt-Country with a very clean almost jazz-like ambience".

Based in New York during the last half of the nineties, Stellan did lots of live shows at clubs like CBGB's, Gaslight and Sidewalk, and recorded the album "Time leaves you behind" with Patrick A Derivaz who has previously worked with Television, Luna and John Cale. Stellan also did some studio work for other artists, for instance he's playing harmonica on an album by New York rockers Sour Jazz, and the song "Watching TV" was featured in the independent film "Rhyme and Reason".

Returning to Sweden he reformed the band, released the "So this is what the end looks like"-EP, and started playing live again in Stockholm (as well as a small acoustic tour in India in 2003).

The new album "The Excitable Gift" was recorded by Sten Hårdbåge at Das Boot Studio in Stockholm and mixed by Linus Larsson (Anna Ternheim, Eldkvarn and others). The band consists of Johan Werner on lead guitar and piano, Johan Adelman on bass, Magnus Bergman on drums and Stellan on vocals and guitars. Here they've taken their music further towards folk rock - lots of piano, acoustic guitar, violin and an electric Hagström 12-string can be heard on the warm-sounding analogue recording. The lyrics are rich with imagery and tell the story of the way towards endings and break-up.
The first single to be released was the sombre and beautiful "Ocean Ave" which got a lot of airplay on college radio stations in Sweden and abroad.
"The Excitable Gift" is an exciting and varied effort, an album about love and the loss of it.



PRESS

"A very strong band performing some amazing music. Wahlstrom is a songwriter of the Townes Van Zandt/Bob Dylan school - not that his work sounds anything like either of those artists, but he has the same confidence in his storytelling"
// The Big Takeover (USA)

"True feelings and authenticity...Might come to mean a lot to many people"
// Upsala Nya Tidning (Sweden)

"Stellan is succeeding well with the down to earth melancholy"
// Ett Noll Ett (Sweden)

"Definitely honest" (7,5/10)
// Ici Magazine (Canada)

"Some of the intensity from which great albums are made"
// Realmusic (Germany)