Sov Gott Rose-Marie

They started as Pärson Sound, making lengthy, unravelled rock improvisations that sound like The Dead C twenty years early, but in 1968, this gang of Swedish countercultural players were going by the name International Harvester, and recording the music that would end up on Sovt Gott Rose-Marie, perhaps the best album from this continuum of beautifully unhinged music (they’d soon morph into Harvester, and then Träd, Gräs Och Stenar). Sovt Gott Rose-Marie takes the primitive thud of elemental drone-rock to wild places, with so-dumb-they’re-smart riffs disappearing into a sea of noise; bleak hymns played at snail’s pace; and agrarian dreaming via folksy round-the-campfire improv. It’s curious to think of how this music must have been received in its time – it was certainly more popular in its home country than loosely parallel groups, like Velvet Underground, were in theirs – particularly because it truly does sound effortlessly contemporary.