Now, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. The hard way involves five or six hundred words evaluating the background, intentions and execution of What Makes It Go?, straining the whole pile of mush through the comedic civ, presenting you at last with a velvety- textured creme brulee of pointed critical prose. The easy way involves me asking one question: You like Stereolab? Good, you'll probably like Komeda.

Which is not to say that these meticulous Swedes are ripping off the 'Lab-- far from it. Hell, this kind of pulsing, Moog- saturated pop is everywhere these days, the end result of many shared influences. The lineage here is clear: Esquivel, Can, Kraftwerk, Dean Martin, Devo, Burt Bacharach and a few sixties film composers. Roll them all together and you have that fully- automated, space- age- lounge- funk that Stereolab fans know and love. It's funny-- it doesn't seem so long ago that it was considered both novel and daring for bands to integrate the tired sounds of the Ramones and Black Sabbath. I think they called it "Grunge." Now anything goes, and bands like Komeda draw inspiration from a dozen sources, making this is a truly exciting time for music.

Here you've got the standard guitar, Moog, bass and drums, plus a string quartet on a handful of tracks like the spooky "Cul De Sac" to give a decidedly cinematic slant to the proceedings. The inventive and catchy melodies are sung by Lena Karlsson, who balances the genre's requisite machine- like intonation with a bouncy sense of fun. The only complaint is that the occasional tune that sounds like it's channeling a lite- FM station ("It's Alright Baby" and "Curious"). It's in these instances that I have to put my foot down and say, "This kind of easy listening stuff sucked the first time around and it sucks now, retro irony be damned." Fortunately, these distractions are temporary and infrequent, and overall, I'm reminded of the sentiments of my peers at OstersundsPosten, who said of Komeda, "Redan en klassiker!" To this I say, "Ditto."

-Mark Richard-San