Love Is All members Josephine, Nicholaus, and Markus spent a long time in indie pop band Girlfrendo. When the band split no one wanted to stop playing. Their buddy Johan was called in to play on a 7 for a Swedish label called Dolores. Love is Alls first single, Lost Thrills, was released in an ambitious pressing of 300. Fredrik Eriksson had seen the band a few times and asked if he could play saxophone. Everyone agreed. Love is All was officially born.
The band began to write. They experimented with different directions for their sound, but the answer was presented to them in one whirlwind day, when they wrote and recorded Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up, and the Love is All sound was discovered It was made in one breath and recorded in one take a couple hours later. explains Nicholaus. Writing was followed by recording, a very logical step for most bands. Love is All and record label Whats Your Rupture? were keen on asking Woodie Taylor to produce. Woodie had done some work with Lee Perry and drummed with Morrissey and the Meteors. Unfortunately, no one had the money to go over to England or bring Woddie and all his echo boxes to Sweden . so the band recorded three songs in about three hours on a small 8 track bleeding with noise and hiss and mailed them to Woodies lovely Windsor estate. Woodie added reverb and some top secret tricks we really cant tell.
While other new bands were dropping mp3s all over the internet, Love is All decided to take a more traditional, more punk rock approach to getting their music heard they made four 7s before ever making a full-length, the covers of which were hand silk-screened in Kevin Pedersons kitchen, and sent them to independent radio stations like WFMU who instantly championed their songs. In fact, most of the people who first helped get the bands name out there happened upon them by sheer coincidence. NME made Make Out, Fall Out, Make Up Single of the Week after Sean Forbes, the infamous buyer at the Rough Trade Shop in London, realized he received ten copies more than he should have and thought some journalists should hear them immediately. Two weeks after being made Single of the Week, the band received a call from John Peel to fly to London to record a legendary Peel Session.
And so they decided it was time to make a record, which they called ‘Nine Times That Same Song’. Songs on the album combine elements of many different genres dance punk, Riot Grrrl, No Wave, indie pop and fuse them into one wholly unique thing, the inevitable conclusion of a band whose influences lie all over the map. Josephine loves old indie punk bands like Kleenex and X-Ray Spex, I’m really into Can, Brian Eno, The Kinks, Jonathan Richman, Slayer… one record I think we all like is the first Roxy Music album! says Markus. Nicholaus says simply, I guess we influenced each other a lot.
The album spread like a wildfire upon release, popping up all over the internet and into the hands of a few journalists eager to hear the band that magically had a Peel Session before an album. Before long, they were being written about in the New York Times, Spin and landed on the cover of The Fader, solely by word-of-mouth and a true love of the bands songs. When it was announced that the band would be playing a few US shows, among them 2006s SXSW festival, a frenzy broke out amongst music fans, resulting in packed, sold-out shows throughout Texas, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City, where more than one fan crowd surfed and everyone sang along on the top of their lungs. This is the reaction a good dose of love will inspire. Especially when its from Love is All.
