Next week = big week here. Oodles of new writers who I will definitely get round to emailing either tonight or tomorrow (plus all yr old favourites), MCR, R Kelly, Tinie Tempah (twice), Kanye West, The Fall, Pissed Jeans and, er, KT Tunstall – stay tuned, kids…
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[5.91]
Anthony Easton: On Mad Men this season, the cultural split is between those who love Perry Como and those who love the Beatles. What we are reminded of is that there was something lost when the Beatles won — that the earnestness of emotion dissipates into the irony of self-created identity. Anne Powers notes this loss when she suggests that Frank Sinatra should make it to the rock and roll hall of fame, right beside Elvis, and I am reminded of Don Draper’s desire to hire those fantastic old crooners when I listen to this, which has the skill and the ability, but not the retrofuturism, of a Buble or an Isaak.
[7]
Chuck Eddy: His kitschen-sunk Tin Pan Alley affectations remain retch-worthy, but at least this time I didn’t totally hate the verse about the election. So, compared to “Happiness Will Be My Revenge” last year, probably a (very) slight improvement. [2]
Martin Skidmore: What if Marit Bergman were a weedy-voiced bloke? We might get this. It has her Spectorish touches and something of the same songwriting style, but the singing is like a poor man’s Morrissey. I really like the music, there’s a decent tune, and he’s a clever enough lyricist to grab plenty of indie attention, and if he could sing as well as, say, an average first-cut X Factor entrant this might be really good.
[6]
Alfred Soto: This guy wrote so many worthwhile tunes in 2007 that it killed me I couldn’t get past his dolorous voice; I simply don’t care for Viva Hate like I did in 1990. So I’m prepared to note that opening line “There’s gotta be someone here tonight who can explain to me” is the lyrical correlative to a vocal timbre that hasn’t learned much in three years. Thanks to overdubbing his own call and response harmonies and a string section whose colors evoke Dionne Warwick and The Queen is Dead, he almost gets away with it here.
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: He does his swoony-romanticism-tempered-by-existential-doubt thing, and it’s just as good as it ever is, only maybe a bit less necessary this late in the run. If you’ve never heard Jens Lekman, this is as good an introduction as any; but if you have, you’ve heard it already.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: Jens has, once again, mustered a sound too big for his song, and a song too big for his voice. Lyrically, he’s getting a little too clever-clever and zeitgeist-chasing for his own good too.
[5]
Mallory O’Donnell: Oblivious towards current pop trends to a virtue, this is quite perfectly timeless and almost painfully lovely. The bittersweet, oddly triumphant theme dances blithely through a series of casually beautiful arrangements many artists would be content to let a whole song dwell in. Typically, Jens bursts through the gauze of sumptuously wounded strings and half-hearted woo-ooos with a revelation that few songwriters today would bother trying to express, much less drape so elegantly: that one’s own existential heartbreak is really rather meaningless in the face of the world’s great sweep. Yet it is just as the music becomes fully widescreen that the lyric gleams with its most intimate, telling details – “the Flatbush Avenue Target / and their pharmacy department,” indeed. Stunning.
[10]
Andrew Casillas: Most of the time, I’m a big sucker for Jens Lekman’s more saccharine moments. His Morrissey-like cadence typically cuts through his themes like butter, and I find the exaggerated grandness of his recent singles to be charming. But this track doesn’t get a rise out of me — and that’s because the song doesn’t much “rise” at all. The strings and drum beat don’t make much of a stir, and Lekman’s vocals just blend into everything else. Not to mention the lack of humor that typically redeems even his most polarizing songs. Ultimately, the best thing about this song is its title. Take that, Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World”!
[5]
Alex Macpherson: A saccharine life lesson from a moping milquetoast that mistakes stating the obvious for gravitas, has all the profundity of an Alain de Botton tweet and is as comforting — and, indeed, as welcome — as an unsolicited “cheer up, love, it might never happen”. Extra demerits for shoehorning in a clumsy Obama reference.
[1]
Iain Mew: The first few times I listened to this I was expecting a twist which never arrived. More than anything on the last album, it’s a plunge into comfort music, strings and flutes draped delicately around Jens in full-on heartbroken romantic mode. Its cuddliness eventually won me over completely, though I suspect that an established love for Jens Lekman the musician and persona may be a crucial factor here. The highlight, which took a long time to notice, is probably the moment where he sings “distance to the star consolations” before being corrected by his backing vocals, which may or may not be deliberate but comes across as an awesome Freudian slip.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: August was a dismal month. Shunted out of a job, family in the ER, out of touch with acquaintances and not quite in the new apartment, I spent most nights alone on the highway shuttling stuff. Around the same time, I’d bought a Swedish indie compilation on impulse, and it stayed in the car changer because radio was terrible, all my CDs were packed and I couldn’t bring myself to comb the coffee cups and old paperwork built up under the seats for stragglers. So as I drove and wondered whether the woods around I-40 would accommodate a car, the most terminally, dreamily happy music I’d ever heard hung around me like rose-colored haze, not quite canceling out the world but trying. Jens Lekman was on this CD, and his newest single arose from similar conditions. It’s not perfect — the Obama verse is a non-sequitur both in the song and in 2010 — but I hear it and I’m suspended between moods again. This won’t actually lift your shadows, but it’ll try.
[7]