Mando Diao Wanna Move You

Being from nowhere can have its advantages. For Mando Diao, growing up in the industrial city of Borlange -- "the ugliest town in Sweden," according to singer-guitarist Gustaf Noren -- gave the band a chip on its shoulder. "We always say, 'We want to be the biggest band in the world!'" says the twenty-four-year-old Noren. "We want to influence other people to form bands or break up with their boyfriends or whatever."

Packed with lush, harmony-laden love songs and smart forays into Zombies-style psychedelia, Mando Diao's second disc, Hurricane Bar, is more romantic and melody-driven than the adrenalized trash rock coming from most breakout Swedish bands. "There's nothing similar between us and the Hives," says twenty-four-year-old co-frontman Bjorn Dixgard. "Except guitars."

Noren and Dixgard, both of whom had plundered their parents' Beatles and Motown records, met when they were sixteen. Taking the meaningless name Mando Diao from a dream of Dixgard's, they recruited two buddies to play bass and drums and took any gig they could get. "We played Chuck Berry songs for hours out in the woods for some woman's seventieth-birthday party," says Noren, "then helped her in the kitchen."

Mando Diao's break came on a European tour featuring up-and-coming Swedish bands in 2002. Though they won over festival crowds, they soon ran into trouble. "We didn't like the other bands, so we told the press we didn't like them," Noren says. "Some of the musicians were, like, thirty years old -- we thought you should be doing country music at that age."

If Mando Diao's brazen self-confidence has earned them some homeland enemies, it's also kind of charming -- a latter-day version of the us-against-them anthems Pete Townshend used to write -- and a boon to their manicured throwback sound. "To believe in yourself is a problem," Noren says. "People are always trying to put young people down -- parents, teachers, the waitress at the coffee shop. Rock & roll is the only place where young people are in charge."