David Fridlund - Amaterasu
(Adrian Recordings)

If you like David & the Citizens I shall hereby save you a minute or two by informing you that David Fridlund's solo album sounds like David & the Citizens and it's as good. So stop reading and go and buy it now, thank you very much. For all you other people who have never heard David & the Citizens, here you go:

It seems to be quite a trend to release solo albums lately in Sweden, but whereas usually these solo outings take on a completely different form than how the artist's band sounds like (e.g. Fireside's Kristofer Åström, International Noise Conspiracy's Dennis Lyxzen's Last Patrol, or Millencolin's Nikola Sarcevic), David's solo album sounds in fact quite a lot like a D&tC's first album (only a bit slower and less energetic). Even though it would have been interesting with an album that sounded completely different from D&tC, "Amaterasu" is so good that one quickly forget the initial disappointment and such before mentioned speculations, because by calling this just "another D&tC album" what that really equals is "another excellent album."

Another expectation on solo albums is of course for the lyrical content to deal with more personal issues, but if you've heard D&tC you know that their lyrics hardly can be any more personal and intimate. It should also be said that David Fridlund writes excellent lyrics and often manages to come up with lines that cunningly drill themselves into your brain, set root, and refuse to leave (such as "Rub your allergic eyes and look at me" from "Satellite", which is one of the best songs on the album). In the beginning of their career numerous people compared D&tC to Bright Eyes, and that comparison is still valid although "Amaterasu" is not as angst-driven as most of Bright Eyes' material. It's also a quite long album, but it's so varied it hardly ever becomes repetitive, but it's not really amazingly accessible either and it took quite a few listenings before I really got into it.
- Simon Tagestam