Pitchfork

It's hard to remember December on 90-plus degree days, but one of the only things that got us through the last frosty winter was Sally Shapiro. The wispy-voiced Swedish synth-pop singer made cold seem like a good thing with her icy-hot Italo disco single, "I'll Be By Your Side"-- Pitchfork's #27 track of 2006. The groundhog didn't end up seeing his shadow this year, but the arrival of her Best New Music-honored debut, Disco Romance, would've gotten us through another six weeks of the slushy stuff.

Disco Romance is finally getting a proper U.S. release later this year on the Paper Bag imprint, with three new songs and a previously vinyl-only version of "I'll Be By Your Side". One of the new tracks, "He Keeps Me Alive", is a cover of a song by Swedish twee group Nixon, who also originally performed Shapiro's quite lovely "Anorak Christmas". Shapiro's shy vocal sounds perfectly natural voicing Nixon songwriter Roger Gunnarsson's words of gentle, just-friends longing, over producer Johan Agebjörn's melancholy synth pulse. Agebjörn explains: "We simply discovered that we hadn't covered his best track so we had to correct that!"

[from the U.S. version of Disco Romance; due 10/30/07 on Paper Bag]