The Lea Riders Group - The Singles 1966 - 68 (2018)

The Lea Riders Group weren't the best Swedish band of the '60s, but in a field crowded by imitators of British Invasion acts, they were one of the most original. Their shining moment was their 1968 single "Dom Kallar Oss Mods," one of the standouts on the psychedelic volume of the original Pebbles series, with a grinding guitar riff and birdcall blasts of guitar distortion backing the garbled English-Swedish lyrics of failure and alienation. Nothing else they did was nearly up to that level of inspired psychedelic madness, although they did release five singles between 1966 and 1968 (all of their other songs were entirely in English). Guitarist and singer Hawkey Franzen wrote virtually all of their material, which pursued a jagged rock-blues line and some petulantly rebellious lyrics ("But I Am and Who Cares?" and "The Forgotten Generation" were a couple of his more memorable titles). A pretty strange group in the context of mid-'60s Sweden, they nonetheless didn't have the vocal or compositional talents of the best (if more conventional) Swedish rock bands. Their records weren't bad, but are now mostly notable for their curiosity value.