Those Dancing Days – In Our Space Hero Suits

With a cartoon clarion call, In Our Space Hero Suits gets underway with the anxious ‘Falling In Fall’ that sees this female five-piece display their ability to write a catchy pop song and put it in the correct position on the album.

Not a lot else is achieved at this point, no broken ground put perhaps a tapping foot.

This is followed up by more of the same, a high tempo drum beat under a low vocal, with some oohs and some aahs and a melodic guitar-keyboard combo keeping everyone in tune.

The result is a kind of Pony Up! copy, with less thought and a more considered appeal. By the third track proper there is a sense that perhaps this band has just the one idea, not necessarily a bad one but maybe not twelve tracks worth. Single ‘Home Sweet Home’ is a highlight nestled nicely at the eighth track, but even this is only an improvement on what already exists as opposed to anything new.

Variety is attempted by way of a slightly slower drum beat and a more prominent synth lead on ‘Hitten’, but other than that it really is very samey. ‘Actionman’ threatens a new direction with what could be a second album opener but it quickly reverts to the formula. None of this is necessarily bad; as mentioned, there are eleven likeable tunes here, with some good lyrical ideas on some novel topics and some memorable song titles, for which the creators have played about with the best of their native Sweden’s recent musical output. The Cardigans and Ace of Base would be proud to have written some of these songs, but may have made something a bit shorter than this out of it. They advertise themselves as a “mixture of pop, girl group and Northern Soul,” and they do indeed live up to this statement with tracks that will get you dancing, maybe even singing along, down at the disco.

Those Dancing Days are definitely worthy of your time, but maybe just pick up the five track EP that preceded this album release, or even look somewhere else for a fix of this kind of thing, such as Los Campesinos!, Operator Please or Shout Out Louds. They are a variation on the intriguing theme created here, and this is exactly what Those Dancing Days are missing.