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Sol Skugga
Swimming Without Webbed Toes
Accented
Sol Skugga ("Sun Shadow") is an emergent Swedish pop diva, and Swimming Without Webbed Toes is a confection of soaring vocals and lightly snarled English over a homeostatic ambient-electronica-gothic foundation. Swimming Without Webbed Toes, Skugga's first full-length CD, aims for the interplay between light and dark, and Skugga's songwriting achieves a lyrical balance that comes across as Euro-pragmatism—a blend of youthful naiveté and cutting brutality. Fans of Enya will appreciate her soaring vocals, but this is not your mother's music. "Crash," "POTM," and "Don't Depend On Me" stand out musically; "Tonight," the CD's closer, is the most divergent track on the album. Skugga surprised me; I expected a Brittney-esque pop princess and got instead ABBA's club-hopping grandchild. She has an impressive vocal range, and several tracks are individually interesting, but there's not enough range to keep me compelled through the full CD. Check out "Empty Street" and "Intuition" on her MySpace page for samples that show greater diversity.
—Lyn Dunagan
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