Second Sun

"Dreams transport desires / Drive you when you're down / Dreams transport the ones / Who need to get out of town." Music is not about showing off what you know or are capable of, it's about spreading the world's greatest gift - that of dreaming, thinking, and exploring. Passion and inspiration are everything, take it from wherever you can and do with it whatever you want.

Second Sun could've been just another "featuring ex-members from"-band, and in a way, they sort of kind of are. Stipen has been playing with everything and everyone, including death metal pioneers Merciless and Swedish punk legends Dia Psalma, Jakob played in Tribulation during the Formulas of Death and Children of the Night albums and Marcus has done his time with short lived but brightly burning punk band Moralens Väktare and also presently in the vastly underrated Corridor People. But these previous, and ongoing, endeavours are not the point in themselves. The point is that, hopefully, the band has done enough things collectively to ignore guidelines and good advice given and thus find the strength to go beyond whatever borders rock music has set up for itself during the last 50 or so years.

The now patented mixture of seventies prog/rock, folk music and unconventional Swedish lyrics speaks volumes, and whether the band serves up hard hitting heavy metal anthems (about spiders), 17 minute epics (about rats) or quirky kraut bangers (about how people in general and grown-ups working full time jobs in particular has got everything wrong), it's all unmistakably very Second Sun-esque - passion and inspiration is everything. In the words of singer Jakob Ljungberg; "If we can make one single person feel the way I felt when I first heard The Last in Line album at age 13, and I just had to pick up a pair of drum sticks or else I'd have exploded, we've succeeded and it has all been worth it."

Photo: Hedda Seeatony Pärnänen