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Tuesday, November 06, 2007
“i’ve longed for your voice from the other side, i know you so well.”*
boys w/ high pitched voices, plinky keyboards and a good harmony and i’m hooked, line and sinker. loney, dear is all of that and more. emil svanängen is loney dear.
loney, dear is swedish pop folk, my fav! i don’t know what it is about the swedes and music, but they certainly have it down. if you like upbeat folk-y music loney, dear is so your speed. i’ve had loney, noir, loney dear’s 4th album on repeat since i found it the other day. it was released state side back in february…and i’m not sure how i missed it, but i am certainly glad i found it. and w/ it i found loney, dear’s most recent release to us here in the u.s.: sologne.
jeez, i don’t know where to begin…other than that i wish we, you and i, yes that’s right, me and you were good enough friends that when i told you to buy two albums you would just do it. because that’s just the friendship we have. but i know relationships are based on trust. i just wish you would take my word for it. all i know is that there are three things that make an album worth it for me. harmony. lyrics. and the want to play it more than once. the repeat button factor, as it were.
loney, noir and sologne have all three requirements. both albums are a bit different, but not enough to really say so. loney, noir is a little younger, not as composed or layered as sologne. it’s also a bit poppier than sologne. i could sit here and dissect both albums but honestly i’ve been playing them back to back and i’m coming out of a mashed potato food coma at the moment. so why don’t you cruise on over to his myspace page and decide for yourself. or just buy one of the albums, i’d never knowingly lead you astray. seriously, i love you.
while you’re hemming and hawwing and hovering over your itunes (both albums are a measely $9.90) and wondering if you should buy an album check out this great, creepily wonderful animated video for their single i am john directed and created by andreas nilson.
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There’s only one plausible explanation for Sweden’s excellent public health care– they hate our freedom. As such, it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. administration runs out of predominantly Muslim countries to test its ordinance on and decides it’s time to bomb these uppity Swedes off the map. When this inevitably happens, cultural anthropologists sifting through the Swedish music that’s made so much headway in the States over the past couple of years will be presented with a rather misleading portrait of the country. Studying music by I’m From Barcelona, Peter Bjorn and John, and Jens Lekman, they’ll conclude that Ben Gibbard and Stuart Murdoch collaboratively authored the kingdom’s public school English curriculum, explaining why Swedes, who must be as diverse as anyone else when expressing in their own tongue, turn into starry-eyed ingénues when they sing in English. They’ll knit together a portrait of a populace with polarized emotions– the most fantastic whimsy on one hand, and the most plangent melancholy on the other– that spends all its time swooning joyfully into each others’ arms or staring forlornly out of windows.
At the level of content, Sweden’s Emil Svanängen (who records full-band songs by himself as Loney, Dear) is of a piece with recent Swedish indie pop imports. He’s sorry– honestly sorry– that he ruined your day. He gets things wrong; he’s not accustomed to this. Every lyric on Loney, Noir is engineered to express Svanängen’s sensitivity, earnest romanticism, and stubborn optimism. The record brims with the cultivated naiveté of classic anorak music, with Svanängen’s lovelorn musings revolving around the uncertainty of first crushes, not the grim intractability of troubled adult relationships.
Despite the current Swede-pop trend’s homogeneity, I never tire of it when it’s well-turned (as Loney, Noir is), because it allows me access to an emotional space that I’ve long since left behind, one of sweetness and simplicity that’s a welcome respite from adulthood’s befogged relativism. This is comfort music, and comfort never goes out of style. And while the aura of dreamy romantic abstraction is the same, Svanängen distinguishes himself from his peers on the structural level.
While at times Loney, Noir indulges in IFB-style Swede-pop’s jangly bounce– the excellent “I Am John” trampolines a exuberant falsetto refrain off of fleet acoustic guitar, dainty chimes, and soft horns– the bulk of the record is smoother and darker, with a perpetual sense of lubricated glide. The songs tend to start small, and then wax orchestral as Svanängen layers emphases onto his simple melodies. “Sinister in a State of Hope” coasts in on glimmering synths and a chunky guitar strum, tightly wound, which gradually open out with hymn-like fervor. “I Will Call You Lover Again” builds a whirling minuet around its spongy synth tones; “Saturday Waits” starts as terse acoustic pop and ends in a swirl of farty bass and efflorescent harmonies.
The music’s twinkling churn is a pleasure, but Svanängen’s voice is the emphatic thread that holds it together and tends to commandeer your attention. It’s high and oil-slick, frequently glowing into a neon falsetto. At once soft and garish, it describes a tremulous yet pitch-perfect weave through his glassy range. The wispy, trailing notes he breathes through the gentle synth-pop of “And I Won’t Cause Anything at All” are impossibly winsome; ditto the low murmurs on the baggy, waltz-timed “I Am The Odd One”. It hardly matters what Svanängen is saying or how he’s saying it– his voice sounds as lovely at rest in a single note as it does in motion through several. It lends itself to clichés about comfortable old blankets and the like. This is perhaps the music’s downside– the omnipresent comeliness of Svanängen’s voice can start to bore into your skull after awhile. After all, even the comfiest blanket chafes if someone’s giving you an Indian burn with it.
- Brian Howe, February 06, 2007
Monday, June 04, 2007
Arriving home on Sunday, I napped away the cumulative fatigue I felt after being kept awake all of Saturday by a drunken tambourine player. I had no intention of going out again, until I noticed that earlier in the week I’d made plans to go see Sweden’s Loney Dear at Lee’s Palace. It was a relatively early show (10.15 set time) and I was somewhat rejuventated, so I set out with little to lose.
Normally, when 120 people are in the 500-capacity Lee’s Palace, it’s a very lonely affair. But right from the first song, Emil Svanängen and his four-piece band drew everyone to the front of the stage for their first Canadian show ever. They were audibly very happy to be there, and despite the venue being too big for the crowd, they professed shock that anyone other than the promoters were coming to see them on their first headlining tour. So imagine their surprise when the Toronto audience not only recognized songs within the first two beats (“even my own band can’t do that,” Svanängen deadpanned), but called out for Swedish rarities that Loney Dear weren’t sure they remembered how to play. And, like the Bruce Peninsula audience (though nowhere near as emotional), the audience only got louder and more demonstrative as the show went on.
The look on the face of every band member was priceless. One only has to imagine what it’s like to land in a foreign country halfway around the world to find such an outpouring of love and familiarity. (“You know our songs better than we do. It’s creepy!”) For the boyish Svanängen, who writes stadium-sized anthemic choruses set to a modestly ambitious, richly harmonious folk-pop backdrop, you could see all of his bedroom four-track fantasies coming to life as he listened to these rambunctious Torontonians take up his wordless choruses.
It had the campfire intimacy of a Track and Field show, and yet here we were in an ugly, black-walled bin that we’ve all been a thousand times before. There were those there who were obviously ubergeeked about this largely obscure Swedish band (the fact that they’re on Sub Pop here is their only claim to fame so far), and the rest of us quickly fell in love with the disarming stage banter of Svanängen. But the magic here was watching the band be swept up in the moment, especially when they returned for a richly deserved second encore (as opposed to the confessed artificiality of the first one, befitting Svanängen’s self-deprecating humour).
The connections continued as we all shuffled out the door, as I overheard two Japanese guys recognize each other from back home, finding each other again in a Canadian bar watching a Swedish band. It was the perfect cap on a weekend of musical intimacy, of moments where the world seems that much more smaller.
“All I want is a state of hope,” sang Svanängen. Few people in either audience this weekend could have stated it more simply.
-end-
radiofreecanuckistan.blogspot.com
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Track Marks: How Loney, Dear Became This Week’s Biggest Artist In The World
Welcome to another edition of Track Marks, in which your Idolators perform an autopsy on the latest band burning up the MP3-blogger charts.
Artist: Loney, Dear
Hometown: Stockholm
Album: Loney, Noir, out today
First blog mention: A concert review (in Swedish) by Jullans.
The Build-Up: The English-language music blogs started to get excited about Loney, Dear last month; Little Elpees, Invisible Limb, Captain’s Dead all mentioned them favorably, as did heavy hitters 3hive.
The Dam-Break: Just in time for Loney, Noir’s release, mentions of Loney, Dear have picked up, with posts at Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, Indiefolkforever, HearYa, and DoCopenhagen, as well as an interview with Lunapark6.
Odds of Backlash: 3-1. Not only is Loney, Dear a Swedish outfit that creates pretty, handclap-accented pop, the band’s MySpace page says that Emil Svanagen, the band’s mastermind, is planning to shut down his entire music-making operation by New Year’s Eve 2009, which almost makes him impenetrable to blogospheric eye-rolling.
Is He Worthy?: Blame it on our avowed weakness for orchestral Swedish indiepop, but we’re pretty into this album–although it’ll probably get lost among our ever-growing collection of such records within the next six months. That, of course, makes the expiration-date idea even more shrewd.
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As much as I love the Canadian music scene, I have to admit that the Swedes are definitely giving us a run for our proverbial money. In the last year or two, I have been exposed to acts such as Jens Lekman, Peter Bjorn And John, El Perro Del Mar, I’m From Barcelona, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, as well as several others. I don’t know what the kids are eating over there but the quality of music coming from that part of the planet is staggering. I finally got around to purchasing “Loney, Noir,” the latest release by the one-man Swedish spectacle Emil Svanängen, otherwise known as Loney, Dear. Like all of the artists mentioned earlier, Loney, Dear is another purveyor of perfect pop music. The album gets better with every song, and it’s remarkable that a recording that is this animated is the brainchild of only one man. The songs are upbuilding and content, focusing on all things positive. That in itself is different that usual indie pop fare. The songs race along at a rapid clik, keeping the listener enthralled and enthused. I’ll lay off the song-by-song review this time since it’s already been done at length throughout happy blogland, but if you’ve been on the lookout for your good mood, it is sure to be found in the sweet falsetto of Emil Svanängen.