Since this blog doesn’t have enough segments already I would like to throw one more in the loop along with My Space Mining, New Music Tuesday and Find of The Week. In the World Tour segment I will be selecting a different country in the world to inform you fine readers of the great acts that are hailing from there. To make it easy on myself for the first installment I have selected Sweden.

This Scandinavian country has become, for the indie world, what Seattle was to the grunge world in the 90′s; there are so many great bands coming out of there right now that it would be impossible to give due justice in this small blog post, but I will try. I am going to skip over the obvious choices of The Knife, Peter Bjorn & John and I have already raved about Loney Dear in other posts. So let’s take a look at some other lesser know bands that you will be hearing more about in the near future.

First, Jose Gonzalez. Yes, he is from Sweden and this is not a miss post from Tobias’ earlier MySpace Mining post. I wouldn’t say that Gonzalez is unknown, just not as known as he should be. You may recognize his song “Heartbeats” from the Sony Bravia commercial. Armed with just his slightly effects laden voice and an acoustic guitar Gonzalez pushes out some of the most effortless sounding beautiful music that you can imagine. With obvious classical guitar training Gonzalez has turned the solo singer/songwriter genre on it’s ear.

Without being told who it was, one couldn’t be blamed for mistaking teen sister duo First Aid Kit as Brandi Carlile. Both churn out acoustic folk with strong female voices. FAK is years ahead of themselves in every aspect of songwriting which I can only attribute to the  bond between sisters.

Technically from Norway, Pony The Pirate call to mind the likes of Arcade Fire with their fast paced indie pop. This eight piece band was recently named Årets Urørt 2009 by Norwegian Radio which apparently is some kind of big battle of the bands for Norway’s largest radio station but I can’t be for sure since I don’t read Norwegian.

With bands like these coming out of it, it’s not surprise that Sweden has one of the highest life expectancies. If I lived there I would want to stay alive as long as possible to hear what was next too.