Ground Control Touring

From seemingly out of nowhere, Love is All seem to be everywhere – the cover of magazines, darlings of the internet and on the lips of every die-hard music fan in America. The result of a well-manicured press assault? One would think that was the culprit, but, in actuality, the luck that has struck this Gothenburg five-piece – Josephine (vocals, keyboards), Nicholaus (guitar), Markus (drums), Johan (bass) and Fredrik (sax) – has been absolutely dumb, making both no sense at all and the most sense in the world.

Where to start…..

Josephine, Nicholaus, and Markus spent a long time in indie pop band Girlfrendo. The release of their first LP, Surprise Surprise, led to a small lot of fans, tours of America, Japan, Sweden (home sweet home!) and the UK. Their first American tour was organized by NYU student Kevin Pedersen to accompany another small UK group called Comet Gain. And BOOM! The quietest explosion ever…but that will be explained later. The second Girlfrendo LP was released, and their small lot of fans got even smaller (probably the work of the DC sniper). And their poor fate was sealed when Girlfrendo.com was taken over by a Russian internet porn ring.

Girlfrendo split, but no one wanted to stop playing. Their buddy Johan was called in to play on a 7” for a Swedish label called Dolores. Love is All’s first single, “Lost Thrills,” was released in an ambitious pressing of 300. Their old pal Kevin loved it so much that he asked them to record a single for his new label, What’s Your Rupture? And when Fredrik Eriksson was asked to play Sax on the single , Love is All was officially born.

Without expectation, the band began to write. They experimented with different directions for their sound, but the answer was presented to them in one whirlwind day, when they wrote and recorded “Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up,” and the Love is All sound was discovered – “It was made in one breath and recorded in one take a couple hours later.” explains Nicholaus. Writing was followed by recording, a very logical step for most bands. Love is All and What’s Your Rupture? were keen on asking Woodie Taylor to produce. Woodie had done some work with Lee Perry, drummed with Morrissey and the Meteors, but, more importantly, recorded and produced Comet Gain’s Realistes LP… which is everyone’s favorite anyway.

Unfortunately, no one had the money to go over to England or bring Woddie and all his echo boxes to Sweden…. so the band recorded three songs in about three hours on a small 8 track bleeding with noise and hiss and mailed them to Woodie’s lovely Windsor estate, which, incidentally, is located just down the road from a very old Jimmy Page. Woodie added reverb and some top secret tricks… we really can’t tell.

While other new bands were dropping mp3’s all over the internet, Love is All decided to take a more traditional, more punk rock approach to getting their music heard – they made four 7”s before ever making a full-length, the covers of which were hand silk-screened in Kevin Pederson’s kitchen, and sent them to independent radio stations like WFMU who instantly championed their songs. In fact, most of the people who first helped get the band’s name out there happened upon them by sheer coincidence. NME made “Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up” Single of the Week after Sean Forbes, the infamous buyer at the Rough Trade Shop in London, realized he received ten copies more than he should have and thought some journalists should hear them immediately. Two weeks after being made Single of the Week, the band received a call from John Peel to fly to London to record a legendary Peel Session.

And so they decided it was time to make a record, which they called Nine Times That Same Song. Songs on the album combine elements of many different genres – dance punk, Riot Grrrl, No Wave, indie pop – and fuse them into one wholly unique thing, the inevitable conclusion of a band whose influences lie all over the map. “Josephine loves old indie punk bands like Kleenex and X-Ray Spex, I’m really into Can, Brian Eno, The Kinks, Jonathan Richman, Slayer… one record I think we all like is the first Roxy Music album!” says Markus. Nicholaus says simply, “I guess we influenced each other a lot.”
The album spread like a wildfire upon release, popping up all over the internet and into the hands of a few journalists eager to hear the band that magically had a Peel Session before an album. Before long, they were being written about in the New York Times, Spin and landed on the cover of The Fader, solely by word-of-mouth and a true love of the band’s songs. When it was announced that the band would be playing a few US shows, among them 2006’s SXSW festival, a frenzy broke out amongst music fans, resulting in packed, sold-out shows throughout Texas, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City, where more than one fan crowd surfed and everyone sang along on the top of their lungs. This is the reaction a good dose of love will inspire. Especially when it’s from Love is All.