for whom
the bell tolls sk pe
July/August 2008
Swedish Trio Makes 80s Manchester Their Own
“L
ending the sound from your favorite time / Sixty, seventy, eighty-nine / Play something that they heard before / Don’t do it better, just do it more.” These lyrics from The Bell’s “On and On” are an interesting challenge from a band whose music is undeniably rooted in the 80s UK alternative scene—reviews of the Swedish trio’s debut LP Make Some Quiet almost invariably reference Echo and the Bunnymen, Joy Division, the Cure and the like. But The Bell can get away with such commentary about recycled pop because their nod to the past comes with a confidence in their own wintery post-punk sound, and an acceptance of listeners’ need to categorize even when there’s a lot more going on. “To a certain degree [the references are] amusing, because most of the bands we get comparisons to we haven’t been listening to since they were active and we were in our teens,” says lyricist and vocalist Mathias Stromberg. “I think that
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by Evie Nagy also suggests these artists: Joy Division, Interpol, The Church
Photography by Marcus Råberg