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Tobias Klevbom

About Me

With their zestful soundtrack of banned cartoons, and with a lyrical range from the Old Testament to opium dens in Shanghai, Stockholm-based octet King Oliver’s Revolver makes it hard to believe that granddad was not a headbanger.

The band includes talented multi-instrumentalists and the rhythm section of a praised tango band from Stockholm. Add to that a three-piece horn section, barbed wire guitars, battered banjos and the delirious ravings of singer Tobias Klevbom, and you’ll have a band that easily raises a crowd at any given Saturday between 1911 and 2011.

Tom Maxwell (ex Squirrel Nut Zippers) writes about King Oliver’s Revolver: “Musical genres, to them, are so many dishes in a marvellous smorgasbord, and they avail themselves to the banquet. Most importantly, these forms are always in the service of their individual expression, and are thus emotionally and artistically authentic.“ Thus the album “Gospel of the Jazz Man’s Church“ is a bit like an Indian masala: Vampiric beguine meets with orchestrated balladry, and biblical horn-pop mixes with inebriated circus music.

It’s an inviting collection of songs, mainly written and arranged with a playful attitude towards exoticism, fables of the New World and Christian seriousness. Here, surfed-up klezmer and brooding arabesques get along just fine and the flavors don’t kill each other. Although the album is hard to label with a clear-cut genre, the music bears a significant relation with the swing revival of the mid 90s.