05/07/08
Text: Bryan Hood, Chau Tu, Nik Mercer
Photographers: Alexander Wagner
We dropped fifteen of our favorite thirty Bands to Watch this year in Anthem No. 34, and, as promised, are delivering the other fifteen to you loyal readers via this newfangled Internet!
We're dropping five each Wednesday for the next three weeks... after that, we'll make available online the fifteen we debuted in print. Sound like a deal?
This page is five pages long―one page for each musician or band―so be sure to click through them all to get the entire scoop!
Additionally, we've got a couple jams for your listening pleasure in the media player to the right. MP3 links are called out on the each of the artists' respective pages.
Juvelen
When Juvelen writes on his website that he wants to restore the good name of pop music, he isn’t joking. A growing Internet sensation from Stockholm, Juvelen tops poppy synth beats and riffs with a sexy whispering falsetto and catchy lyrics like "Oh honey I just want to make you move/You should know I only do this for you" (on single "Don't Mess"). It's shameless and uninhibited, but it’s also just the product of desire and hard work finally pulling together. "Juvelen was to a large extent born out of frustration with what I had done musically so far, and out of longing to do what I hadn't yet dared do," he says. "At least at the beginning Juvelen was a lot about reaching for forbidden fruit."
Listening to Juvelen, it’s easy to be reminded of pop masters Prince (who he admittedly admires) or the Jackson Five. It was another sexy artist from the 1980s whom Juvelen was compared to, though. "In Germany someone started calling me Blue Eyed Soul, which I really liked. And at first I thought he invented the term for Juvelen. But then I realized people had been calling George Michael that for a long time... Still feels good though." C.T.
