For all their sugary kitsch and ineffable blondeness, The Cardigans always seemed stricken with a kind of self-loathing. They didn't want to be fun, they always protested, they wanted to be rock. All that pastel-shaded retro-pop was a sarcastic joke that misfired when, by accident, they became an international pop phenomenon.
As suggested by 1998's 'Gran Turismo', the real Cardigans are actually a lot more serious than they first appeared. Five years in the making, more or less, 'Long Gone Before Daylight' confirms this. Frequently, it sounds like the band have spent most of that time labouring to make their fifth album as monumental as possible. Where once they swung, however ironically, now they plod. Slowly. Ponderously. In expensive lead boots.
Lord, this is a joyless record. There's quite a knack to making great love and attendant heartbreak sound boring, but Nina Persson achieves it. On 'Couldn't Care Less', she wearily dissects a relationship, observing, "We're just not there any more, but we really don't care, do we?" Churlish as it may be, you can't help concluding the band have reached the same state of apathy toward one another.
Either that or they actually want to sound like a catatonic Fleetwood Mac. 'Long Gone Before Daylight' resembles one of those blustery '70s AOR albums with all the blood - and cocaine - drained out. The defining colour is grey. The prevailing pace is a little too stiff-limbed for Radio 2. The highlight, of sorts, is a ballad called 'Please Sister' that they would have been better off selling to Celine Dion. They even try and bring down the entire Swedish rock establishment with them, by enlisting Pelle Almqvist from The Hives (emphatically not Howlin' here) and Ebbot Lundberg from Soundtrack Of Our Lives to provide utterly characterless backing vocals.
Of course, bands are entitled to change, even grow up. Quite often, it proves to be a good idea. But 'Long Gone Before Daylight' makes 'adult' a pejorative term again, just as it was when Annie Lennox won a Brit every year. Love and music have rarely seemed such unwieldy, resentment-fuelling burdens.
