My recommendations 2006:Silent Shout by The Knife

The Knife: Silent Shout
Mute 7/25/2006

In high school I wrote a paper proposing that Scandinavian geography and climate created conditions that favored greater interpersonal dependence than in other European cultures, which resulted in some cultural phenomena that Americans might find peculiar. It was utter bullshit; I pulled it completely out of my ass without actually having done any research to back it up. Nonethless, I got an A on the paper, probably because my thesis was completely plausible. One look at the history of pop music in Scandinavian countries and one might swallow my theory wholesale. The Knife is a brother-and-sister duo from Sweden that serves as an example of this. The Olof and Karin Dreijer seem to have created a private language of cultural symbols, which the use to create a bizarre form of technopop. Or maybe it just seems weird because of my American cultural biases. Perhaps the Dreijers find Jack and Meg White incomprehensibly eccentric.