South Florida Musicians Take Over Sweden This Month
The Jacuzzi Boys do Gothenburg this weekend. Photo by Ivan Santiago
The big cities in Sweden are nearly the diametric opposite of those in South Florida: They’re kind of cold all year, but they’re quiet, clean, and full of people who wait calmly in line and speak grammatically correct English. Don’t get us wrong, though, we love our bizarro corner of the universe and its loud, messy brilliance — which is why we kind of love the image of South Floridians repping us over in Scandinavia. And August finds two of these instances, completely unrelated and involving two of the best, but vastly different, acts to break out from our shores.
The first is Miami’s beloved Jacuzzi Boys, who finished a fairly extensive tour through the U.K. and continental western Europe earlier this year. This coming weekend they arrive in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city, to play the massive Way Out West Festival. A boutique festival this is not — this is a massive, three-day affair with big-bucks headliners like Wilco, the Black Keys, and Florence and the Machine.
The Boys’ slot is a little weird; this is one of those festivals that goes late-night, so they’re playing at 2:45 a.m. on Thursday night/Friday morning. Still, the other acts playing around the same time include Ceremony, Memoryhouse, and How to Dress Well, so hey, that’s not too bad.
By the way, to see what the rest of the world thinks of when they think of both the band and their Miami fans, the first thing mentioned in their bio on the Way Out West site is the cringe-inducing Jacuzzi Gals video. You can click here if you somehow missed the Internet for a while.
Here’s a photo of the festival poster we saw on a trash can in Stockholm in late June — you can see the Boys in small type above Wilco:
The other South Florida native act heading to Sweden is Blonds, who, okay, now reside in Brooklyn. Considering they left only this year, though, we’ll still claim them, even though they’re appearing in that country as part of a series called “Brooklyn Sweden.” Well, pretty much every band in Brooklyn is from someplace else, anyways.
Pitchfork conveniently left out our favorite co-ed couple band in its recent announcement about the series, relegating them to the sad tag of “others.” In any event, this mini tour features other acts from the borough like Crystal Stilts (which also features some South Florida expats!), Cults, the Hold Steady, and even Blonde Redhead.
The package tour hits all of Sweden’s Debaser mini chain of rock clubs, with locations in Malmo, Gothernburg, and Stockholm, from August 31 thorugh September 1. Here’s a picture of the poster, also spotted in Stockholm, this time at a bus station in the “cool” part of town.
Meanwhile, Blonds’ much-anticipated debut album is due out shortly, and you can hear a new song from it, “Time,” below.
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