Initial listens to Inre Rymden (Swedish for “Inner Space”) reveal it to be a curious combination of slow-motion house music and salubrious New Age funk. In this case, first impressions are accurate, and they should intrigue you enough to dive deeper into the paradisiacal vistas Tommy Awards paint here. The opening track “Prometheus” introduces that feeling of sundown deliquescence that very few musicians can summon, as it locks into a laid-back groove that induces utmost serenity, buoyed by sublimely mellow guitar vibes that should make fans of Manuel Göttsching's Ashra and Phil Manzanera's solo output spring to attention. “Draget” conjures the sort of exquisite elegance and preternatural chill last heard on Roxy Music's 1982 LP Avalon — but somehow it's even more blissed out than that boudoir classic.
And so it goes for most of Inre Rymden: Among the six tracks, only “Rexy” hints at tension, courtesy of a bass line that sounds like it should score a prisoner's walk to the electric chair. But that's tempered by guitar sighs of radiant melancholy, not unlike those lofted by Popol Vuh's Daniel Fichelscher. Even when Inre Rymden gets relatively uptempo, as on “Hans Logan,” it still glides like gilded, glazed, Balearic house jams, urged on by subliminal bongos and dappled with pastel guitar shimmers far off on the horizon.
“Music is love and love is our music,” runs Tommy Awards' slogan (a sentiment beautifully echoed by David Crosby on his revered 1971 album If I Could Only Remember My Name), but one could also argue that it is medicine — a balmy ear massage that spreads healing frissons to all areas of your body and mind. Tommy Awards continue their miraculous act as Scandinavians channeling the tropics with stunning audio verisimilitude.