"Like a bunch of cowboys spinning on peyote, Beatles and Neutral Milk Hotel albums, Isolation Years ties up its blend of styles tighter than NORAD headquarters. A rollicking, folksy head trip filled with touches of everything from classic pop (helped along by the legendary Swedish propensity for the style) to touches of bluegrass that’d send the Telluride recreationists up the wall, Inland Traveller boasts a style few bands can match. Trippy saw noises and bursts of electric guitar put a psychedelic glaze on “Light the Torch,” an otherwise straightforward acoustic tune, but “Cold Morning in Minusinsk” sticks to a simple acoustic twang that’s all Americana. Other times, the Years venture more closely to outright pop, as “Talkin’ Backward Masking Blues” checks left-coast pop with giant guitar hooks while trumpet, trombone and flugelhorn incorporate the sophistication that, until you hear this record, would seem to be the antithesis of its rootsy side.Isolation Years doesn’t just meddle with its influences. The band grasps them, wrestles them into submission, and makes them work for it on this album. While it’s occasionally difficult to wade through Inland Traveller’s sometimes repressingly somber atmosphere – half as many songs drag as get listeners’ hearts pumping – it’s clear these Swedes have a road map for pop success already laid out on this debut."
--R. Paul Matthews for Aversion.com
http://www.aversion.com/bands/reviews.cfm?f_id=1440
Press Sheet: 'Inland Traveller’ is the debut album from Scandinavian quintet Isolation Years. The band, from Umeå in northern Sweden, employs a wide array of traditional folk (accordion, saw, mandolin) and rock instrumentation (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) filtered through an elemental and psychedelic spiritualism. It’s equal parts American Music Club (solemn roots pop), Neutral Milk Hotel (supernatural folksinger blues), and the early albums by The Soundtrack of Our Lives (electrified classic rock mysticism); with broad hints of The Beatles, Neil Young, Calexico, and Bright Eyes to boot. The band’s unswerving attention to depth and detail within a song, along with vocalist Jakob Nystrom’s haunting voice and arcane lyrical imagery, recall some of finest “folksingers” alive today (Eitzel, Mangum, and Lundberg especially). Is he singing about alien abduction or Armageddon… or just winter?
"A supercharged, overdriven debut album from a new breed of northern cowboys, all angst-ridden pomposity and chaotic, paranoid lyrical imagery… Chock-full of immediate hooks and rousing performances, what really gets you however, is the fine careful delivery on a track like "Cold Morning In Minusinsk", which sounds a bit like that other Scandinavian country-preacher, St. Thomas, on a really good day. A song like "Talkin' Backward Masking Blues" could single-handedly revive the trombone's position in modern day music, while closing track "Green On White" is a piece of full-on country psychedelia, enough to scare the pants off of most people but Alejandro Escovedo. Yes, it’s that good..." --Stein Haukland for Comes W/A Smile #10
There’s music that puts you directly in the moment. It’s a signpost, an admonition to notice where you are and what you’re doing -- this moment will be over soon, it tells you… This music will remind you of it forever if you’re paying attention.
Then there’s music that takes you someplace else altogether. It reminds you of something you’ve heard before, but not exactly; it puts images in your head of places you know exist but have never seen; it recalls experiences you’ve never experienced but feel you have just the same, perhaps in a past life or even better! -- a parallel universe. Within these songs there is a place that Isolation Years arrives at that isn’t of this world.
Though in these times anyone can hear music from anywhere with a little effort, geographical seclusion and a closeness to an unforgiving-yet-breathtaking topography has a way of gently mudging obvious influences and informing them, instead, with something uniquely elemental. Located inside the Artic Circle, the band’s hometown of Umeå, Sweden, isn’t the “postcard Sverige” one usually pictures. It lacks the cosmopolitan distractions of Stockholm and the industrial, working-class grit of Gothenburg, Sweden’s two largest cities. It’s not all firs, fjords, and frozen tundra… but they’re in there too.
