Logh

Swedish quartet Jens Hellgren on guitar, Kristofer Rönström on drums, Mattias Friberg handling vocals and guitar, and Mathias Oldén on bass first tracked material under the name Log. Their debut album of atmospheric rock, Every Time A Bell Rings An Angel Gets Its Wings, appeared in 2002 on the Bad Taste label. A required change of name forced the record’s withdrawal. By appending an “h,” Logh placed the same record with the UK imprint Must Destroy, also home to the Darkness. The new edition let listeners once again sink into the languorous guitars and emotive vocals.

The quartet’s clearest touchstones lie in the American alt-rock of Low, Death Cab For Cutie, Slint and Seam, together with the expansive work of Sigur Rós and Pink Floyd. Like those acts, Logh can project fatigue and somberness; lines such as “They said he’d been in for quite a while/When they found him by the riverside” from “Lookalike” are spare yet affecting, circling themes of death, alienation and outsider lives. The band insists the album title was not drawn from Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life but from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Although Logh later labeled Every Time A Bell Rings An Angel Gets Its Wings a student effort, the music remains measured and balanced, avoiding both cloying sweetness and stock melodrama.