A band is like a team is like a gang is like an army. Swedish electro-poppers the Tough Alliance are just a duo-- Eric Berglund and Henning Fürst-- but their name can suggest all of those meanings. So can their music, albeit through sweet melodies, shiny dance beats, and blindingly idealistic self-expression. Last year's A New Chance and 2006's New Waves EP explore a broader sonic palette, developing the dreamier qualities of 2006's mostly instrumental excursion Escaping Your Ambitions, but never have TTA sounded more muscular or dance party-ready than on 2005 debut The New School.
The New School has a hidden track with a Liverpool crowd thundering out the terrace anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone". "Tough II" could be TTA's own theme song, an inspirational opening with choppy, pitched-up vocals and imposingly high synths. "In the Kitchen" finds the duo in "pole position", where they shout such future Nike slogans as "life's a mission"; bird-backed "My Hood" puts on for Fürst and Berglund's city. But lest you think all the titles could double as R. Kelly songs, TTA are family-friendly enough to have their own product endorsement of sorts: "Koka-Kola Veins", with its "blah blah blah" chorus and "just wanna have some fun" credo, remains the duo's catchiest and most dancefloor-friendly track to date.
When TTA declare, "Against my baseball bat/ No one has a chance," on the joyfully delinquent "Make It Happen", though, it's safe to assume they aren't bragging about reading Charlie Lau, Jr.'s The Art of Hitting .400. "Forget about labor/ It's time to wake the neighbors," they add. The setting could be a party, a fight, or a rowdy sexual encounter, and the song's original placement on an EP with a 50 Cent cover doesn't provide as much helpful context as you'd think. On "Koka-Kola Veins" they tell us, "We've got our own jihad, if you know what I mean." I don't. "Break the rules," suggests "Keep It Pure". Now we're getting somewhere.
"Don't test us," TTA threaten on "Forever Utd.", but there's more bliss than menace in their cameraderie. Both here and on the coral reef-lush "Keep It Pure", TTA hint at their blissed-out future, evoking the imagery of compatriots Studio, Air France, and the Embassy. Time spent with the right person can be paradise, the beatific "Holiday" suggests, but this kind of escape, made dazzlingly vivid in the three videos included with the new The New School, also has a childlike quality. "We can't feel as good as when we make believe," they claim on "Koka-Kola Veins", staking out imagination as part of the sincerity-as-ethos embodied on A New Chance.
For all their cheap pop thrills on one hand, and lofty interview pronouncements on the other, TTA are just a band. Berglund and Fürst acknowledge this like fans, hiding Easter eggs alluding to rock, hip-hop, and pop in their songs for their most obsessive listeners to find. They nod twice to Spacemen 3, their careening, circus-ready electro-pop cover of Primal Scream's "Velocity Girl", renamed "Velocity Boy", appears on the reissue as another part of the hidden track, and elsewhere they slyly recall Pink Floyd, the Paragons, Blondie, and the Notorious B.I.G.
This practice is made explicit on bonus track "Take No Heroes", modeled on Daft Punk's name-dropping "Teachers" (and later sampled by Jens Lekman). "Take no heroes, only inspiration," TTA advise, and for this divisive, galvanizing, all-or-nothing band, it could be its rallying cry. The message also should ring true for your band, team, gang, or army. Kick over the statues. The shoulders of greatness are there for the standing. When you make the next leap-- even if you fall flat on your face, or change directions in mid-air-- your accomplishments will be (sincerely) yours, win or lose. And only losers lose.
- Marc Hogan, September 17, 2008
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