Interesting fact number 1: Roxette is the second most successful Swedish band of all time, with sales of approximately 80 million albums worldwide (Abba continues to be, and probably will forever be, the leading Swedish musical export thanks to the 400 million albums it sold).
Interesting fact number 2: apart from a decade-long hiatus at the beginning of the millennium, which ended with an exciting comeback in 2011, Roxette never stopped its activities.
The duo, which included lead writer and vocalist Per Gesell and the formidable vocalist Marie Frederickson, released ten studio albums until Frederickson passed away in 2019 after a courageous and persistent 17-year battle with cancer.
"Not replacing Marie"
Now, about three years after his partner passed away at the age of 61, Gesell (63) is reviving the "Rocket" brand name with a new album called Pop-Up Dynamo.
The twist: the band is now called PG Roxette (an acronym for Per Gesell), and Gesell is the only frontman.
The other members of the band are musicians who have performed with Roxette over the years, and two female vocalists: Helena Josephson and Dia Norberg.
Both, by the way, don't come close to the vocal abilities of the late Frederickson, but that seems to be part of the idea.
"It is impossible to replace Marie and that was never my intention," said Gesell before the launch of the new album.
"Our time with Roxette was an incredible fantasy that we shared with each other. I'm excited to continue Roxette's journey, but in a different way. Needless to say, if Marie was still here, we would have done it together," added the veteran musician, who had to say goodbye to his soulmate before time.
Rockest in concert in Israel in 2011, photo: Koko
A lightweight album
But even though it's very hard not to like Gesell and appreciate his talent, we have to admit that Pop-Up Dynamo is having trouble delivering the goods, and won't leave a mark on the pop world like Roxet's first albums from the late 80s and early 90s of the last century.
We don't just mention these albums, as Gesell himself explained that when he started working on the new album, he aspired to create a "modern sibling album" to Look Sharp!
from 1988 and Joyride from 1991, the two most successful Rockest albums by a huge margin.
Full disclosure: the writer of these lines believes that Joyride is one of the best pop albums of all time (its CD version was pulled from the archive this week for repeat listening ahead of Pop-Up Dynamo).
He knows every note and every sound in it, so such a bombastic announcement on behalf of Gesell must come with receipts.
she does not.
The cover of PG Roxette's new album, photo: PR
Pop-Up Dynamo is light years away from the league of the two albums Gesell compares it to, and the absolute majority of it doesn't even resemble their style, which leans more towards pop-rock, with lots of guitars and very little electronics.
In fact, the new album is more reminiscent of the musical projects from the middle and end of Roxte's career, which pretty much abandoned pop-rock around 1999 in favor of computerized and rhythmic pop-dance, appropriate for the time.
Not a single track of Pop-Up Dynamo's 11 songs compares to the level of classics like "Joyride", "The Look", "Listen To Your Heart" Spending "My Time" and "Dangerous" (a huge song that never got the respect it deserved On the other hand, you will actually get some light, short, non-committal but also harmless pop pieces here, where Gessel mostly sings the verses while the female singers perform the choruses. A representative example of this is the single "Walking On Air". A cute song and. .. That's it. Just cute.
Much better than nothing
and yet, after a few listens we had to admit that there are actually some songs on the new album that somehow managed to make us smile and reminded us of the good old Roxette.
The first is "Headphones On", which might have fit into Joyride thanks to its rhythm and guitars;
The other is the ballad You Hurt The One You Love The" "Most which sounds like an homage to Rockest's classic "Listen To Your Heart";
while the third is "The Loneliest Girl in The World", which was also released as a single and might have found a place on the 1994 album Crash Boom Bang Reasonable Plus.
the others?
Less, but you won't hear any complaints here.
And that actually leads us to interesting fact number 3: no less than 36 years(!) after releasing their debut album, Rockest (kind of) is still here to make us happy.
If Marie is looking down on Gasel, we're sure she's cheering him on.
were we wrong
We will fix it!
If you found an error in the article, we would appreciate it if you shared it with us