Billie The Vision & The Dancers

Hailing from Mälmo, the seven-piece group Billie the Vision & the Dancers specializes in tuneful, chipper, folksy pop distinguished by idiosyncratic and occasionally mawkishly sentimental lyrics. Sweden produces an apparently inexhaustible stream of comparable acts, although few match this ensemble’s penchant for unrestrained band names. The multi-racial, multi-gender collective centers on singer-songwriter Lars Lindquist (not Billie, though he is unmistakably a vision: a statuesque transvestite with blue eyes and shocking, fiery red-gold hair), who assembled the musicians in 2004 to realize material originally planned as a solo endeavor. Their debut album, I Was So Unpopular in School and Now They're Giving Me This Beautiful Bicycle, presented the collective’s signature style of twee pop—lush, rootsy, musically accomplished, and surprisingly tasteful, yet undeniably, adorably cutesy. Issued on the band’s own Love Will Pay the Bills imprint and offered as a free download via their website, the record followed the pattern of all subsequent releases. The follow-up, The World According to Pablo, was tracked during summer 2005 inside a borrowed country house and placed the presumably fictitious Pablo Diablo at the heart of its narrative thread. Lilly, a second recurring character in Lindquist’s winding, conversational stories, had already surfaced on the opening track “Summercat” from the Bicycle album. Both records earned nominations for the Swedish indie music Manifest prize and allowed the group to build a substantial domestic and overseas audience without major-label backing or outside publicity, aided by astute online promotion and an unconventional live strategy that encompassed performances at high schools and prisons alongside support dates for the Pipettes. Their third full-length, Where the Ocean Meets My Hand, appeared in April 2007.