Saturday, August 25, 2018

RÅG I RYGGEN – Råg I Ryggen (Rondo, 1975)

Swedish vocals, English vocals, instrumental
International relevance: ***

A hard rock six-piece with Jonas Warnerbring (son of Swedish singer Östen Warnerbring) on vocals and Björn ”Nysse” Nyström, future guitarist for pop star Magnus Uggla and others. Their lone and bilangual album has a fair share of progressive moves sometimes bordering on the symphonic. It's easy to see why ”Råg I Ryggen” fetches some grand sums – it's habile and heavy with lots of guitars. Some songs are OK albeit with boneheaded lyrics, such as ”Jan Banan” and the riff happy ”Sanningsserum”, but something's lacking. Warnerbring isn't the singer a band like Råg I Ryggen needs, his vocals are too colourless. The album pretty much falls in the Blåkulla category. Nice try, thanks for playing, sorry you lost.

The album was reissued by Transubstans in 2005, with three previously unreleased live tracks added.

Warnerbring tried his solo luck in the 80's, releasing one album and a handful of singles, before joining band French Revolution. Later yet he wrote songs for various mainstream artists. 

Full album playlist

2 comments:

  1. One of the swedish MOST EXELLENT album (If not the best in my opinion) and this was a music group that deserves a GOOD MUCH better fate than just disappearing into nothingness.

    Every song is in a PERFECT HARMONY and this album in 1:st edition is ONE of the really hot "MOST WANTED" by many swedish and foreign collectors and that makes it to a "difficult-to-find"-album.

    I'm not sure but I've seen an album with "Råg i Ryggen" ("Rye In The Back", one of many funny names on the bands in Sweden at this time) but with a diferent envelope once and I regretting I didn't bought it so I'm pretty sure that was a 2:nd edition of that album.

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    1. I wasn't aware of a different second cover, but it seems there was an unofficial reissue of it that had a group picture on the front, which seems to have been the same cover shot as on the original cassette release (which I didn't know existed either until just now).

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