Dina Ögon (SWE)

Dina Ögon is like a bumblebee–big and fluffy and it should be impossible for it to fly, but it does it anyway–quite simply as well. Anna Ahnlund, Christopher Cantillo, Daniel Ögren and Love Örsan have had forty fingers involved in an un-numerable amount of Swedish rock, jazz, soul and pop projects, recordings and tours and all kinds of hush hush.Between themselves they’ve played in different constellations and played back up for each other, assisted even more in one form or another formore than a decade. But now they’ve formed a more remarkable quartet than what transpired from any of all the shenanigans they’ve previously been involved with.

It’s not conventional wisdom to mix every delicacy you like when cooking, but Dina Ögon seem to have gotten away with it and their time spent in the studio seems to have been dedicated to a rebuttal of that wisdom. Folk rock, soul, bossanova, jazz and hip hop beats get on well together in this space and seem to infect each other and the listeners.Rather than a band that had their breakthrough as young and hungry, Dina Ögon is a quartet that have devoured everything in their way. Especially the Black American musical treasure–and then they’ve let it all filter out from a Nordic horizon, sometimes wistfully, sometimes cool and laid back, sometimes breezy, sunny and exuberant. Jazz is always in the back informing the whole–the music sounds hard to play andeasy to listen to. For every song that surrounds you in a lean cool another one with a euphoric drive shows up. It’s the drive in your headphones that’ll make you dance sitting down on the bus in the morning or home alone, although you can hear miles away that this music is even larger live.