When I was 10, I had a Swedish nanny who used to sing lullabies to me in her native tongue. One night, a friend slept over, but unbeknownst to her, he was the son of a Swedish diplomat. When she left, he said, “Her song is about hoping you die in your sleep.” I said, “It’s so beautiful, I hope I do, too.” None of that is true, but it illustrates a good point. Dungen’s Gustav Ejstes has never sung in English, but language is only a barrier if you perceive it to be. Allas Sak, Dungen’s first album in nearly five years, is a brilliant pastiche of styles—swelling piano/guitar prog, quirky jazz fusion, Traffic/Jethro Tull-tinged rock—with Ejstes’ quietly evocative voice becoming another musical texture in the absence of discernible lyrics. With repeated listenings, his unintelligible phrasings can take on some faux-significance as one’s imagination shapes it into a recognizable form. For the record, Allas Sak loosely translates to “everyone’s thing”; from Ejstes’ Swedish mouth to the world’s multilingual ear.
—Brian Baker
