Miike Snow

It would be unforgivably glib to say that Miike Snow — an electropop trio from Sweden — sometimes sounds like ABBA with an echo deck. But it's true! It's so true. Crisply emotive, with unusual phrasings and a disarming dash of neo-funk, the music has inspired comparisons to Vampire Weekend...

By Craig Outhier

June 3, 2010

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It would be unforgivably glib to say that Miike Snow — an electropop trio from Sweden — sometimes sounds like ABBA with an echo deck. But it's true! It's so true. Crisply emotive, with unusual phrasings and a disarming dash of neo-funk, the music has inspired comparisons to Vampire Weekend and Animal Collective, but with a mutant kitsch gene that's unmistakably Scandinavian. Led by vocalist-songwriter Andrew Wyatt, an American who teamed up with Grammy-winning musician-producers Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg (Britney Spears) during an extended Swedish holiday, the trio has won acclaim for remixing the likes of Passion Pit, Kings of Leon, and Coco Sumner but is arguably more famous for their bizarre on-stage accouterments, including surgical masks, unsightly dustings of face powder, and other moribund motifs. (At Coachella last April, they donned THX 1138 robot-zombie masks.) Those disguises will serve a dual purpose in Arizona: 1) amusing their fans, and 2) hiding them from the vigilant eyes of SB 1070-minded law enforcement, lest their pigment-impaired complexions give them away as undocumented ESL-rock aliens.

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