FREAK KITCHEN – Cooking With Pagans (CD)

Freak Kitchen, this institute of Swedish retrofuturisticontemporary musical madness and melodic mayhem, is again back with another collection of mind-boggling songs. Lyrically the band’s ironic, cunning and satirical lyrics are the antithesis of Steel Panther. But the similarity is that you sit there and happily sing along to lyrics you would normally not even speak out loud, such as “(Saving Up For An) Anal Bleach”. However, in this case you actually get a second layer that gets you thinking. Think, yes, as a musician I am thinking when I listen to songs like “I Don’t Want To Golf” and the whacky rhythmic things going on, where you as a “normal” listener just groove to the rhythm. Well, don’t be fooled by the easy going surface, there are weird things happening under the surface. It does however surface a bit more in songs like “Mathematics Of Defeat”, which is proggy to the max. Except for the chorus, which is pure pop melodies. I just love the mix of the wackiness and the simple melodies in perfect symbiosis. “Private Property”, written and sung by bassist Christer Örtefors is another cool straight-ahead ditty. There has often been simple yet really cool simple but effective riffs coming out of Mr Eklundh and you get those here as well, just check out opener “Professional Help”, “Come Back To Comeback” and the catchy “Sloppy”. To me this feels like the most even Freak Kitchen since “Spanking Hour”, and this has quite quickly become my favorite since then as well! The only question mark of the album has to be the odd cover of “Goody Goody”, but what the hell… we’ve heard “La Bamba” coming out of this man before so why should I be surprised? All in all this is a damn great album! 

Janne Stark

Year: 2014
Country: Sweden
Label: Thunderstruck