Artist: House Of Shakira
Label: Lion Records
Release: 1997
“Lint” is the debut from Swedish melodic hard rockers House Of Shakira. It originally came out in 1997 on Bluestone Records. When it dropped, the album was met with an incredible wave of enthusiasm, and many critics ranked it the best debut of 1997. Heck, some of them even put this album among the ten greatest debuts of all time.
The truth lies somewhere in between. House Of Shakira started out as a band called The Station in the early nineties, under the heavy influence of the commercial glam “shock hard rock” explosion, which was largely the fault of their fellow countrymen, the ones people like to conveniently skip over – Europe. In the very beginning they looked like just another “innocent” glam hard rock band – a bunch of naughty boys with teased hair, lacquered nails, powder caked on their cheeks and shoe polish smeared around their eyes.
By 1997, though, the guys had clearly not only changed the band’s name, but grown up too. The pomp and the eccentricity were kept, but only inside the songs themselves. The guys ditched the lipstick and the other methods of surprising and stalking girls. “Lint” is a reflection of a long, hard, thorny road. You can feel that the songs were written over a long stretch of time and that the guys really picked only the best of the best. “Lint” is, quite simply, a perfect album.
On top of that, House Of Shakira built in a hugely important factor for the overall picture of the album: a recognizable identity of their own. The melodies like to lean toward the “untouchable” norms of the AOR purists Journey, especially in the vocal lines, and they spring from the image of European hard rock classicism, which follows the example of strict refinement in its feel for stacking melodies and combining motifs. These carry practically the highest degree of mutual compatibility, because they soak you up in an instant, and yet even after repeated spins of “Lint” in your player they always leave you totally satisfied. Besides some seriously inventive and original riffs (Morning Over Morocco, Lint, Method of Madness, Who’s Lying Now?), the guys were very much drawn to the spirit of Eastern religions in this period. It sounds strange and honestly kind of quirky, not to say unbalanced, and even the band themselves couldn’t tell you anything other than that they were doing whatever felt best at the time, but it’s more than obvious that somebody in the band was strong enough to smuggle “third world” ideas into a hard rock foundation. And they pulled it off incredibly well. So it’s not just the band’s name and the album cover, House Of Shakira deliberately work “Hindu” tricks and even Afro ethno flourishes into their sound (the vocal choir melodies in Elephant Gun or Canned Laughter, then the instrument lines in The Story’s The Same or Everything’s Fine – the solo up front is a killer)! That makes House Of Shakira one of the few bands in a richly populated genre, where more or less everything has already been said, that still offers a high degree of exploratory freshness, wit and one more special something! Throughout the record there’s a constant feeling of positive energy, and no, I’m not superstitious or anything, but this album has a certain exuberance, sparkle, cheeky playfulness and joy of life. The verses and melodies are full of optimism and a positive outlook on life. Exactly what we’re missing!
“Lint” came out again on 22.05.2006! This time in a digipack and on the Finnish label Lion Music. As such it carries two extra tracks, both written by the band themselves, and their quality only confirms what fierce competition they were up against in 1997, so fierce that the band had to cut them from the tracklist of the songs that ended up on the debut. The only downside of this remastered reissue is the label’s sloppiness in putting together the booklet: they printed the lyrics for Everything’s Fine twice, and stuck the titles of both bonus tracks on the page with the band photo.
House Of Shakira really do deliver an extremely polished debut, both stylistically and production-wise. The balance of the instruments is outstanding, the vocals are charged with voltage, with a melodic, colorful touch of Steve Perry (Journey), the bass line carries a living groove, the riffs combine punch and melody in the perfect ratio, the band makes sure every single song is dressed up with vocal harmonies, and on top of that there are solos that tear your pants off – the Swedish school, you know, yet without wasting a note. Every move on this record is so clear, clean, simple and effortless that an album this infectiously fluid really deserves top marks, especially on that front. Sexy!
The only shame is that with “Lint” House Of Shakira basically committed commercial suicide, as my buddy Sandi would put it, since the album came out some eight or nine years too late, at a time when darkness and decline had actually settled over the global mainstream and everything creative, and the gods of rock music had long since forgotten about AOR and melodic hard rock, so this album never got the recognition it deserved and, sadly, in all likelihood never will.
Lineup
Andreas Eklund – vocals
Anders Lundström – guitar, keyboards
Mats Hallstensson – guitar, backing vocals
Per Schelander – bass guitar, backing vocals
Tony Andersson – drums
Production
House Of Shakira
Tracklist
1. Morning Over Morocco
2. Lint
3. Method Of Madness
4. No: 8
5. Who’s Lying Now
6. Elephant Gun
7. Love Was Good
8. Story’s The Same
9. Canned Laughter
10. Remember
11. Everything’s Fine
BONUS TRACKS ON THE 2006 REISSUE:
12. On The F’Green
13. Heroes
Album length: 56:36
