“It was back in 1938 that the brothers Erik and August and their friend Viktor migrated south. They left the small village in the northern forests where they grew up for the big city and the university, to study the science of harvesting the earth. On the fields beside the burial mounds in old Uppsala they met Tommie, a Soviet refugee. He showed them his sole possession, a blues vinyl from 5300 BC, suspecting that it would fit their melancholy northern souls. The four sat down in a barn and played a blues jam which lasted until 1945, when the war ended and the post-apocalyptic nuclear winter began…”
So begins the extraordinary tale of Swedish ‘bad luck boogie’ combo THE TOWER, whose cryptic, swinging timewarp of a debut LP will be released via London’s Bad Omen Records on March 3rd 2014. The offbeat freakbeat and phantasmagorical psych-blues of ‘Hic Abundant Leones’ exude an ageless charm and resounding singularity, striking eerie, dreamlike atmospheres that seemingly confirm THE TOWER’s eccentric parallel-universe narrative. Sorting facts from the fantasy of the band’s complex mythology proves onerous; the quartet bonded during “long, all-night rehearsals in an old vicarage outside of Uppsala” and “began as some kind of personal quest for us but once we realised that we had a gospel we started preaching it. It is not something new. It is as ancient as the Sumerian blues records played by the Dionysos cults of the Postapocalyptic Era. Moreover, there have always been prophets of this gospel: wrayed Indians, electric shamans, crazy horses, black skinheads, exhumed singers, diddlying sheriffs, mean lick hookers, third eye girls, many a stooge, all-man brothers, Birmingham attendants of the Sabbath, and many, many more.”