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The Cardigans have long been tagged (and not entirely fairly, they'd tell you) serious '60s revivalists, with a penchant for pinning postmodernism on letter-sweater girl-pop. However, in order to achieve their American breakthrough -- the radio smash ''Lovefool,'' a highlight of both the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack and the Cardigans' album First Band on the Moon -- they had to forge ahead. If only into the '70s.
''We tried to make 'Lovefool' with other beats,'' says Nina Persson, the Swedish quintet's winsome vocalist. ''We tried to make it a bossa nova. We tried many productions, but nothing seemed to work -- so, reluctantly, we had to realize the disco beat was the only savior of it. It's the evergreen recipe for making a hit.''
''Lovefool'' marries that irresistible pre-techno beat to the pre-Aquarian bubblegum the group favors, with plenty of Persson's sweetly rendered emotional masochism on top. Romeo music supervisor Karyn Rachtman was taken by how nicely the lyric's sense of ''innocent love that's overpowering'' matched the film's teen infatuation. Says Persson, ''Love is naive. It can be pathetic.'' So, like so many pop classics, ''Lovefool'' manages to catalog the most obsessive, destructively self-effacing behavior imaginable and make it sound like a swell idea. The last year hasn't produced a better single.
Except that, technically, ''Lovefool'' isn't one. While the video was No. 1 at MTV, and Hits magazine ranks it as one of the most-requested songs at Top 40 radio, a single hasn't been released -- even though it'd be a contender for the top of the charts if it had. ''Our label [Mercury] doesn't want to. I'm sure they know why,'' says Persson, sounding as blindly confident as one of her lyrics' love-struck heroines. A fear of cannibalizing sales of the slow-building First Band on the Moon is the apparent reason for Mercury's decision -- though Capitol's double-platinum Romeo + Juliet has been the obvious beneficiary. ''We have difficulties trying to convince [fans] we have an album of our own [out there],'' Persson sighs.
Fortunately, enough R+J fans have figured it out that First Band has been certified gold. This album moves beyond self-conscious '60s mannerisms to arrive at a perfect median point between ABBA bliss and PJ Harvey bathos; shedding those ''easy listening'' and ''lounge'' tags won't come easy, though. ''That's something the American people read in the English magazines from the period of our Life album [1995]. To continue writing about us that way is the easy way out,'' says guitarist Peter Svensson. Adds Persson: ''We get pretty humiliated by that word kitsch. We're very, very sincere with anything that we do. Even if it's got a tongue in a cheek.'' Love them, love them, go on and love them.
