The Soundtrack of Our Lives – A Present from the Past (2005)

My first experience of the Swedish band The Soundtrack of Our Lives is from the year 2001 when I saw them perform live at Ankkarock, a music festival in Vantaa, Finland. I was blown away by the band's energy on stage. They performed a couple of songs with The Flaming Sideburns, a band that I already liked quite a lot. The air was filled with soap bubbles on a hot sunny day and the energy was just amazing. After this gig I started listening to TSOOL quite a lot and ever since I've seen them numerous times live. Their concerts are among the best ones I've ever seen. It's maybe quite strange to have this B-side and rarities collection as the first album in this blog, but actually this album is so good that it works as a proper album. At the time of its release I was still a really huge TSOOL fan and I was very excited when it came out because it allowed me to hear a bunch of songs from the band that I hadn't heard before.

I remember the first thing I heard about this album was that it was going to include Galaxy Gramophone, a song that the band played live quite often. This was the first good news, but it didn't end there. I really liked many of the songs on the album and 32 new songs from a band you really like feels quite amazing.

Back in those days, in university, I was playing in a band that was really influenced by TSOOL's music. We even played couple of TSOOL songs live as covers on our gigs. This band didn't continue for long as the band members had many other projects going on at the same time and the lead singer was maybe a bit more into heavier sounding music. I would've been very happy to continue playing in a band like that. Guitar rock was really what I was most into at that time and it was great to play in a band with my friends.

I don't think I've seen that many TSOOL music videos. I don't even know how many videos they have. As always, I wanted to find one music video for this blog post. The first one I came across was Pass Through Fear. The song itself is not that amazing, although by no means bad either. The music video is footage from TSOOL's tour. It's interesting to see their wild stage performance on the background of such a ballad.

Other favourites of mine from this album are It Ain't Free ( Living In a Bubble), Dow Jones Syndrome, Lost Highway and Still Get Around. These songs show the amazing guitar playing of this band. For a kid who grew up in the early 90's, guitars and guitar heroes were always very important to me, but as times have gone on, it has been a lot more difficult to find proper guitar heroes as electronic music has invaded most of popular music genres. That's why TSOOL will always have a special place in my heart. They could really play and their guitar solos reminded me of my childhood's guitar gods. Also, the lead singer Ebbot Lundberg's Jesus-like appearance and raspy voice made them just a really cool rock band. I'm looking forward to writing more about this amazing band when I go through some of their other albums.

Listen to the album on Spotify.