Has everybody already heard this band, the Vicious, from Umeå, Sweden? (I have to ask because I’m an ignorant, ignorant square.) I’m just back from a few weeks of running around the rock clubs of Europe (which made me more thankful than I realized for the Seattle smoking ban) and everyone was going nuts for these Vicious guys. (You can listen to some of their songs here.)

Apparently they’re born of a Swedish Umeå scene seeded with money from the International Noise Conspiracy and they’re a guilty goddamned pleasure—all the clichés of punk rock rolled into a beautiful, candy-coated package. The band members are all beautiful and well-pressed, their city (just a few klicks south of the Arctic Circle) has something like the lowest crime rate in the world, but they sing about violence and Clash-type scenarios with “the pigs kicking in doors and breaking bottles.”

I’m not a fan of authenticity for its own sake—the quest for The Real is one of the most stupidly quixotic wastes of time in art, especially punk and hiphop—but it does seem a waste to have such a great band write about such irrelevant subject matter.

They should write songs about how everyone around them is attractive, speaks five languages, and has great style. Or about nationalized health care. They could name their next single “Democratic Socialism Built a Little Ghetto in My Soul.”

That would be great.