The Amazing: Ambulance review – misery rarely sounds this good

You rather get the sense that the Amazing, the Swedish band who share members with neo-psychedelicists Dungen, have spent plenty of nights moping in underpopulated bars, before walking home through the snow. Their third album has an unyielding mood of beatific sadness, of wallowing happily in misery, that makes it blissful rather than a trial. Mood is the key thing: Christoffer Gunrup’s voice is bleached and inexpressive, making it hard to make out the lyrics, and while the Amazing embrace melody, there’s often an almost ambient underpinning to their songs: the hanging organ chord behind Tracks, for example. Influences are evident, without ever being dominant: the somnabulance of mid-70s Pink Floyd; the circular percussive woomph of Can’s Halleluwah at the start of Blair Drager (and one wonders if the album’s title is a nod to the noughties US group Ambulance Ltd, who shared some of the same mood). Ambulance manages to sound both mysterious and familiar at once.