Skraeckoedlan

“Our music is, in addition to good fun riffery and hard hitting drums, the very lens through which we watch life”

Heavy riff quartet Skraeckoedlan are telling tales draped in metaphor. Fuzzy stories buried in melody are cloned into a one of a kind copy of an otherwise eradicated species. Previously found only in Sweden, this cold blooded lizard have once again started to walk the planet that we know as earth. The extinct is no longer a part of the past. Skraeckoedlan is the best living biological attraction, made so astounding that they capture the imagination of the entire planet.

The dinosaurs are believed to have made their first footprints on our earthen floor some 240 million years ago, during what is now known as the Triassic period. Indisputable behemoths and apex predators amongst them, they wandered freely and soared sovereign, ever evolving as the impending Jurassic and Cretaceous eras unfolded. Then, 65 million years ago, it stopped. Be it by asteroid or volcano, the dinosaurs’ fate became one shared with most species ever to inhabit our pale blue dot, extinction.
While Skraeckoedlan translates into something like dinosaur, an analogy better drawn is perhaps one to the great lizards’ descendents, the birds. In their flight there is a, quite literal, escapism to be found. A vital ingredient, encapsulating the bands very being. Although escape, it should be said, not necessarily in the sense of shying away but rather as a recipe for observation and introspection. A kind of fleeing of everyday worries in benefit of larger and hopefully more profound queries A bird’s-eye view, if you will.

“Our music is, in addition to good fun riffery and hard hitting drums, the very lens through which we watch life”, the band collectively states. “Meaning that to a degree music is ever present. It’s how we explore and how we tell stories our words can’t comprehend. It is uncertainty and apathy, anger and frustration, joy and euphoria and all the heartfelt beauty that’s to be found in the process of creating.”
Quite a few million years later than their reptilian namesakes, Skraeckoedlan is leaving their own footprints in earth’s soil, albeit not as physically grand. Their self proclaimed fuzz-science fiction rock is an homage to the riff, vehemently echoing throughout the ages like that of a gargantuan Brachiosaurus striding freely. Equal in weight to the deafening heaviness of a Skraeckoedlan melody, these long-necked colossals further possess in their very defining feature the weapon needed for a complete experience of such melodies. Although strong neck or not, once in concert heads will, regardless of intent, be moving along.

Through their natively sung lyrics Skraeckoedlan invites us to partake in a world of cosmic awe inhabited by mythological beings and prehistoric beasts, like the immense havoc wreaking reptilian awakening from its slumber in the polar ice caps, featured on the debut full-length Äppelträdet (The Apple Tree), or the reclusive great ape Gigantos, solemnly wandering his mountain as one of several entities on the follow-up, Sagor (Tales). Against backdrops like these, underlying themes of the aforementioned big picture-nature are being explored, much in the spirit of, and hugely inspired by, great minds such as Alan Watts and Carl Sagan, fantastic creatures in their own respective rights. Since Mr. Sagan has been briefly referenced at the outset, it is Mr Watts, musical adventurer as he was, that will begin to play us out:
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
Still far from going extinct, releases old and new just around the corner and eras untold waiting to be explored, a statement that rings painstakingly true, as Skraeckoedlan closes with a similarly mannered reflection:

“Our volcano has yet to erupt, our asteroid has yet to fall. When our end, whatever form it may take, inevitably comes, it is with the utmost gratitude and curiosity that we’ll return to the cosmos, hopefully to be kept in its thought.”