Kingen, Ride With Me

My initial kneejerk reaction to Kingen’s Ride With Me was, well, pretty negative. I fully expected to be snickering within a few minutes of putting the disc in the player; I mean, Kingen (aka Torgny Karlsson) is a Sweden-born/-bred singer, pianist, and songwriter who steps and strolls backwards to the era of Elvis, James Brown, and Chuck Berry, all while singing with a funny accent and looking kind of like one of Santa’s elves (he’s apparently fairly short). It’s like a ready-made SNL sketch.

After listening a while, though, I realize that, holy shit, this guy is good. And I, of all people, really shouldn’t be surprised. Everybody knows these days that Sweden’s a hotbed of music, and hell, I’ve even got family ties to it myself — my own father-in-law is a Stockholm-born jazz fan and talented bassist, and his father was an accomplished jazzman who supposedly played with Stan Getz. My wife’s cousin Viktor is a burgeoning hip-hop artist and talented producer, for crying out loud.

So I’m having to look past my own stupid, America-centric musical view to get to the heart of Kingen’s Ride With Me. And what that is is a guy who really, truly loves the retro sound of the music he plays, all the way from the Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano boogie of “Mary-Ann” to the Godfather of Soul-esque sweet defiance of “She’s Mine” to the more countrified, “Honky Tonk Woman”-sounding “Misery.”

Luckily, he can pull it off, too. “Mary-Ann” is nicely rough and pleading, “Ride With Me” takes an Otis Redding groove and gives it new, electric life, “Be-bop Street” does a cool, Elvis-y roll, and “She’s Mine,” the best track on here, is sweet and soulful and fiery, all at the same time.

In spite of my misgivings, I find my toes tapping, my head nodding, and a smile creeping onto my face. Sure, the accent gets in the way some of the time, but honestly, it winds up not being that big a deal. The only track I’m not real big on is “Someone New,” a slow-moving song that painfully evokes Kenny Rogers’ ’70s cheese, but one out of eleven ain’t bad.

And so what if Kingen’s several decades out of time? It’s not like the U.S. has a monopoly on rock ‘n roll — if we had, the Beatles, Kinks, and Stones certainly never would’ve happened. And while it is a little odd to hear somebody so passionate about a musical style that seems so far removed from their environment, both in terms of distance and time, what makes this any different from, say, Amy Winehouse’s fractured re-do of soul? Sharon Jones? The Diplomats of Solid Sound? Brian Setzer? For that matter, Rancid’s Clash-adoring retake of street-level punk? Are either of those somehow more “worthy” of serious attention because the people making the music are in the U.K. or U.S.? Nope. As long as Kingen’s got it where it counts, who cares?