LOVE IS ALL
A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night
What's Your Rupture?

On their second album, five-piece transforms a nation's melancholia into something to cheer about.

Yelping confessions in her tiny, tune-challenged voice, Josephine Olausson clearly has a shit life. She's paranoid about supernovas, stuck on a cruise ship full of hip-replacement survivors, walking home with the last guy at the bar. Yet Love Is All is one of those high-principled bands that refuses to miss out on the party. Somehow Olausson never sounds depressed--maybe that yelping is chirping. Credit four supportive guys rolling out unkempt riffs at tempos so punky they reveal the guitar line of Joy Division's "She Lost Control" for the pop hook it is (with saxophone icing). Also credit choruses so sing-along that Olausson just loves to repeat them, a mite obsessively but never too much. She's the party, it turns out, and if you don't want to attend, well, she kind of likes being alone anyway. She's Swedish.

Blender, Dec. 2008