Dungen - En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog - New Burgundy LP

Format: New Burgundy LP Label: Mexican Summer Cat. No. MEX336 Barcode: 184923133608 Released: 07/10/2022

Dungen release their new album En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog. Translated to One is Too Much and a Thousand is Never Enough, Dungen’s first proper studio album since 2015’s Allas Sak finds the core band of Gustav Ejstes, Reine Fiske, Mattias Gustavsson, and Johan Holmegaard now decades-deep in collaborative focus and elevating their trailblazing psychedelia to new heights.

En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog goes further out than any Dungen record before it. There are classic psych rave-ups, of course, and the kind of brilliant vocal harmonies Ejstes has long made his trademark. There are soft, shuffling grooves that transform into wide-eyed cosmic revelations. There are intimate songs guided by Ejstes and his piano, which he plays so gently it sounds like he’s trying not to wake someone in the next room.

And, perhaps most surprisingly, there’s a bit of turntable scratching, courtesy of Ejstes himself. Monstrous fills from drummer Johan Holmegaard frequently blend with frenetic drum’n’bass programming inspired by the countless UK hardcore jungle mixes from the ’90s Ejstes has been listening to (“that’s what I’m obsessed with right now,” he says). At times, the album verges on ecstatic Screamadelica-style sunshine pop; occasionally it clicks around 160 bpm. On “Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus,” guitars skip like a synth pattern over a shaggy drum beat that sounds both like a late ’60s blowout and late ’80s acid house freakout while Ejstes’ vocal melody doesn’t quite resolve, hanging in the air like an uncomfortable question, full of self-confident insouciance.

While the textures might seem unusual for a Dungen record, Ejstes insists these sounds have inspired him throughout his career—even when they haven’t seemed to. “If you take Mitch Mitchell, Public Enemy, and Swedish psych-organ player Bo Hansson, and you put that in a pot, that’s jungle for me. It’s all about the breaks,” he says. “And these layers of noise. With fuzz guitar, it’s noise under control. It’s the same with turntable scratching for me—feedback and shit, it’s all the same.”