Pitchfork

A complete history of Swedish popular music would strain even the most long-winded reviewer. The Scandinavian nation responsible for the coolly melodic pop of the Concretes, El Perro del Mar, Jens Lekman, Love Is All, and Peter Bjorn & John also brings us the unguarded cuteness of Hello Saferide and I'm From Barcelona, the danceable insecurities of Robyn and Sally Shapiro, the visceral psych-rock of Dungen, and the Knife's 2006-defining haunted house. Blame Sweden, too, for Soundtrack of Our Lives and Yngwie fucking Malmsteen. Good thing they're peace-loving, right?

Stockholm's Labrador Records has helped define the "Swedish pop" sound now heard in club nights from London to Berlin. Cheekily titled Labrador 100: A Complete History of Popular Music celebrates the influential indie label's 10^th anniversary with one song from each of its first 100 releases (including a new track from dream-poppers the Radio Dept.). At more than five hours, the four-disc set contains more than enough overlooked gems for indie-pop fans to obsess over, argue about, and fall in love with. Labrador specializes in sweetly chiming pop in the old Sarah Records mold; its sound has broadened considerably over the years, but don't expect any of the macho garage-rock that put Sweden on the NME's pub-crawl map in the early 00s.

Girlish whispers and Morrissey-esque enunciations are the norm. Early Labrador 100 tracks by bands like Starlet or Airliner display echoes of the Field Mice's bedsit lo-fi, while Pelle Carlberg and his band Edson apply self-conscious wit to Belle & Sebastian's initial hushed tones. The compilation also makes room for Laurel Music's country-inflected yearning, Douglas Heart's shoegaze twilights, Irene's bubblegum soul, the Legends' noise-swathed Northern soul, the homemade electro-pop of Club 8 or Waltz for Debbie, the Pulp archness of Corduroy Utd. and Loveninjas, and the shimmering new wave of newcomers the Mary Onettes.

Out of such gentle nostalgia, Labrador 100 presents song after song of would-be Perfect Pop Songs-- and plenty of them are pretty near perfect indeed. Suburban Kids With Biblical Names set forth a manifesto on their devastatingly catchy "Rent a Wreck": "I want to turn all their dance floors into a burning inferno of ba-ba-ba." Their labelmates have similar designs. Jangly Labrador standouts Acid House Kings ba-da-da on the gorgeous "Say Yes if You Love Me", breezy synth-poppers Mondial na-na-na on "Undeserved Potential", and New Order-echoing dance-pop duo Tribeca ooh-ooh-ooh on defiantly adolescent breakup tune "Teenage". Hell, [ingenting] sing in Swedish, but language clearly isn't the issue here.

For all their world-conquering melodies, Labrador 100's best songs have an uneasy relationship with mass appeal. They're shy. "It's my favorite song, but I don't like the crowd," Sambassadeur explain on one of my favorite songs here, the Velvet Underground-via-C86 "Between the Lines". This is pop, but it's also personal: I might not see the appeal of Wan Light's glassy-voiced space-pop or Hurray's nose-plugged twee, but surely someone will. In Jude Rogers' exhaustive liner notes, Acid House Kings' Niklas Angergard describes Labrador's essence as "quality pop music which sometimes no one likes, but hey, it doesn't matter that much as long as you like it yourself." No wonder Sweden doesn't have wars.