Swedish band, Koala Bar, have just released their latest single, Danger, and we here at the Send Me Your Ears studio have been taking a listen today.
Danger is the tale of a destructive relationship. It is based on a real life relationship that became poisonous at the same time as feeling completely all consuming and, perhaps one-sidedly, unconditional. It is interesting how many artists are writing along this theme at the moment, and it is a subject which needs more attention.
Danger starts on just the drums for a few bars before adding in bass and some lovely dreamy guitar sounds. The bass is simple and leaves plenty of space for the guitars to take centre stage.
As the vocals come in they, too, are very dreamy and heavily reverbed. When the chorus comes in there’s a great use of extra layered vocals being used more as instruments than lyric lines with them all adding to a huge choir like sound. A tambourine is added for the choruses to help distinguish the different sections of the song.
The stop at the end of the chorus is a nice touch, to let the listener, again, differentiate sections, and a few bars of a solo-less instrumental section leads into the second verse. There are patches where the panned left guitar reminded us of The Police.
This is a dreamy soundscape that may be a good fit for use in TV sync and we’d urge Koala Bar to investigate this avenue for their music.
From a production perspective, we felt that the bass guitar is resonating a little on certain notes. A dip around 85Hz would reduce a little of the boominess this is creating. The track is also a bit muddy in places around 170Hz so a small cut here could help reduce that and make the track a little clearer. It also feel a little boxy/honky around 500-600Hz so maybe a cut here too. Some extra brightness and presence could be achieved with a wider boost centred around 9kHz with maybe even an additional high shelf boost in the top octave.
Koala Bar’s, Danger, is a dreamy indie pop/rock song that speaks of toxic relationships. Taken from the band’s upcoming album with Gothenburg-based Rexius Records.