Pitchfork

The Sound of Arrows list their location as "Pop Heaven", Stockholm, and the newest Labrador signees' first mp3 holds the promise of a stairway to just such a place. Jens Lekman would be there. Saint Etienne, too. The Tough Alliance. And the Avalanches-- any act that marries a mix-and-match, genre-hopping aesthetic to irrepressible melodies, the kind that put Swedish pop on the musical map in the first place. The Sound of Arrows are Oskar Gullstrand and Stefan Storm, and "Danger!" is a taste of their forthcoming debut EP, a nine-song affair due in April. Storm's reverb-laden vocal sounds a hook-filled warning blatantly contradicted by the music, springy pop that's also in keeping with labelmates like Club 8 and Sambassadeur. Triumphal string snippets, floaty synths, beaming trumpets, and incomprehensible vocal chatter place the track in a lush pop dreamworld gilded with harp glissandos, sort of like the sunny-day inverse of Pylon's dubby Gyrate frightmare also called "Danger" (or "Danger!!" in the "Jamaican" version). A sample-oriented approach frees the duo to move in slightly new directions by track's end, with guitars, glockenspiel or xylophones, and possibly harmonica lilting across a house-tinged bassline. "I feel so dangerous," Storm concludes, at last pinpointing the source of the supposed danger. If that means the stairway to Pop Heaven is actually just another escalator to nowhere, then, well, fuck. But I hope not.