Straight Up

The Refreshments are a multiple gold and platinum album selling Swedish rock group formed in 1989 in Gävle, whose works have been nominated for Grammy Awards.The brand new album of the Swedish successful band The Refreshments offers a brilliant, timeless fresh mix of Rock & Roll, Pubrock and Tex-Mex.Founded at the end of the eighties in Gävle, Sweden, The Refreshments became one of the country's most sought-after liveacts, with their blistering mix of 50s Rock & Roll and 70s pubrock, and extensive touring (more than 4,000 concerts). But also with their twenty-three previously released (multiple gold and platinum ennobled) albums, including the two recorded with Dave Edmunds longplayer "A Pile Of Rock Live (1997") and "Brit Rock - Back On Track" (2001), they were in their Scandinavian home always highly successful and regularly represented in the local top ten of the charts. Thus, the quintet for their debut "Both Rock'n'Roll" (1995), the guitarist and rock legend Billy Bremner win as a producer and arranger to win (the two other albums should follow).Two years after her last successful work "Wow Factor", the formation, which has meanwhile been cast in quartet form, lays a powerful spell with its new album and impressively demonstrates with the now available "Straight Up" how timelessly fresh her sound has remained today. Here are the twelve excellent, settled between Rock & Roll, Pubrock and Tex-Mex numbers again mainly from the compositional pen of singer and bassist Joakim Arnell, who shares the lead vocals as usual with the pianist Johan »JB« Blohm.Great is also the concise guitar work by Jonas Göransson as well as the fiery soulful accordion playing of guest musician Anders Larssen ("My Vionda", "Reconnez Cherie", "Enough Is Enough"). The band also received additional support on four tracks from the two saxophonists Kai Sundquist and Jens Filipsson.