SOTD #99 // ceo: ‘Everything Is Gonna Be Alright’

This hit me the day after I returned from a long weekend in Stockholm where the Swedish summer is in full swing with a burning sun, nights that barely commence before they end and every inch of coastline dotted with the blonde and beautiful. And of course, the ceo record soundtracking my resigned submission to the almost unbearable heat.

I lay in a shaded patch of grass by the water on the first Sunday in July and lost myself for an hour or two in White Magic, Eric Berglund’s difficult but rewarding solo debut – out now in Sweden and the US but not dropping here until September in Blighty.

Should we think of ‘Everything’s Gonna Be Alright’ – which isn’t on White Magic – as an addendum for the record? Many think so, drawing attention to the album’s short running time, as if size were any indication of quality or indeed anything at all. The ethos of Berglund, The Tough Alliiance and Sincerely Yours always seemed to value the concept of brevity, the carpe diem of life and death. It all makes perfect, harmonius sense. Everything is connected, everything works.

So ‘Everything’s Gonna be Alright’ is more of an extended snatch of sound than a song, drifting in and fading out, scorching the aural receptors with a feint, ashy residue of solar glare, sand between the toes and a pleasing nicotine whiff. You’d be mistaken for thinking Berglund was filtering the living soul of Ennio Morricone’s western soundtracks through a hazy, amphetamine fuelled trip round the archipelago.

Whatever it all means, there’s a glorious groove flipping its wig within the sounds, beckoning you to the delights of the prodigal son from Gothenberg’s first (and perhaps last?) record on his own. It’s not an addendum, it’s a prickteaser….

ceo: ‘Everything Is Gonna Be Alright’