Swedish pop phenomenon Cardigans have admitted that they were pressured to release an album before the end of 1998. The resulting foray into the world of trip-hop beats and samplers should have yielded better results than the unfinished-sounding "Gran Tourismo."
The band knows more about timing and arranging three-minute pop songs than most non-Swedes could ever learn, yet these songs are uniformly too long. The two exceptions to this rule -- "My Favourite Game" and the crisply New Wave "Do You Believe" -- offer more tempo changes than the rest of the album put together. Meanwhile, "The Junk of the Hearts" is the only song with any warmth.
These three tracks would have made a great EP. Maybe a dark and catchy afterlife awaits the deserving material on "Gran Turismo" via remixes and remasters.
