Summers – Loney, Dear
I Was Only Going Out – Loney, Dear
It took me a while to really get excited about the previous record from Loney, Dear (the pseudonym for Swedish pop-songster Emil Svanängen), but once I lived with it for about six months I came to realize that “I Am John” was hands-down one of the finest songs of 2007.
Much the same thing has happened this time around, with his latest effort Dear John. While there’s no single song that approaches masterpiece territory, the quality of the album as a whole is quite high. The main change from Loney, Noir is a somewhat darker texture. What some artists might attempt with rustic and dark neo-folk Loney Dear approaches through a tangled web of pulsing synths. Witness the thick cloud of sound the album’s two opening tracks: “Airport Surroundings” and “Everything Turns to You.” The former is the sound of a lost soul standing in the midst of thousands of strangers – disconcerted and unsure – while the latter is positively claustrophic.
All of this helps to explain some of why it took me so long to really appreciate the record. These two tracks are both perfectly constructed but certainly do not easily offer themselves. Even now, after coming to appreciate them a great deal, the sensation is much more about letting the music flow past than it is about any kind of direct engagement. And that probably applies to the record as a whole. It’s a stranger that you never quite come to know, but increasingly grow to appreciate despite the maintenance of distance.
As ever, Svanängen is a master of pacing. There’s the slow build-up, most perfectly captured on “Summers” which takes more than two minutes to catch fire but once it does…it’s one of the prettiest and most engaging songs of the year. And on the larger scale, the organization of tracks helps to offer some balance. “Summers” fits snugly in the middle of the album, offering some buoyancy to lift up your spirits amidst the gloomier tracks that surround it. Similarly, “I Was Only Going Out” and “Harsh Words” are a welcome relief to the previously mentioned opening two tracks. They offer a lightness and a sense of shared feeling that puts the bleakness in perspective. Not optimism, necessarily. Even when strolling along in a major key Loney, Dear is much more about empathy than happiness.
The two faces of the album, then, are the dull ache of a life lived without intimacy counterposed against the sharp pain of those who leave themselves exposed.
And the overarching theme that connects the two is the degree to which each approach develops its own architecture of meaning. Each song on the album is intricately constructed, with ebbs and flows designed to wring every bit of meaning possible out of the sounds that are deployed. Even for the tracks that don’t fully work for me, it’s extremely difficult to argue with the effort that has gone into their production. “Under a Silent Sea” for example has an internal coherence and range of movement that would please the most classically trained musician.
The songs that work the least well for me are the ones that hold exclusively onto one tone, in particular “Harm/Slow” and “I Got Lost” which remind me of cars circling a roundabout for five or six trips, never managing to figure out which exit they want to take. These are the staging grounds for excursions into something far more interesting, but they don’t really follow through.
On the whole, though, Dear John is an excellent album. And the fact that it took me six months to get around to reviewing it doesn’t change that fact at all.