Jens Lekman has always had that way… a song starts rolling, and just before he turns the
chorus your cerebral cortex thinks, “It would be awesome if he did [this]!” And then he does it. Everything is just one notch below predictable, but satisfying and surprisingly original, given that he courts existing conventions so closely.
Until now, that is, and we’ll get to that in a second, but first the good news…
Night Falls Over Kortedala continues Lekman’s love affair with Bacharach (sure plenty of musicians appreciate Burt, but Lekman wins the prize for current recording artist who sincerely likes him the most) and Brian Wilson, mostly to great success, though the best moments already saw the light of day on previous ep’s and rarity compilations (a strange m.o. of Lekman’s full-length releases). But who cares? There are also heretofore unreleased standouts that deserve praise for camouflaging their sources so well as to not only avoid plagiarism but emerge fresh and crispy. Always clever, Lekman gets a hall pass for flirting with mimicry by likeable self-depreciation and outright silly lines like, “I took my sister down to the ocean, but the ocean made me feel stupid.” Sure he’s a dork, but he never sounds pathetic.
But he ruins some choice cuts by gratuitously exposing his influences. The otherwise charming track nine ’Shirin’ about a black-market hair stylist is sullied in the end by outright thievery of the verse to ‘Don’t Worry Baby’. Taking remnants of old monuments and fashioning them into new sculptures isn’t news, but the Beach Boys melody comes in on strings that don’t appear until the end of the song and not only tortures you to figure out why it sounds so familiar, but makes you wonder if you’ve been listening to stolen property all along. Next up is the cute but puerile ‘It Was a Strange Time in My Life’ (yeah, childish was the point here, I know, but it’s just dumb), of which the most lasting moment is a bored kid on a rainy day with a tape recorder. Maybe this is Lekman’s way of telling us what happens when he makes a full album, which he supposedly swore years ago never to do again. Maybe he’s right… two ep’s of the new stuff on Night Falls might have been better.
But there is a host of greatness on here as well. Unlike most artists, even those who write good lyrics, the words are the first thing you notice on Night Falls. ‘A Postcard to Nina’ has, of course, a nice-enough melody and an ebullient chorus, but the story of a lesbian who talks Jens into pretending to be her boyfriend for a dinner with her kindly but old-fashioned Catholic father is tender, comic and sincere, least of all because Dad is not an ogre but wants the best for his daughter and thinks that he knows what that is.
And it’s not just the lyrics that set the disc apart - ‘If I Could Cry’ uses Lekman’s skills as an arranger to sonically explain how it would feel if he could cry (apparently, it would feel like Donna Summers). And his admiration for the likes of Brian Wilson and Belle and Sebastian is well-represented in tracks like ‘I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You’ where a break-up letter is juxtaposed with a clandestinely electronic update of ‘God Only Knows’, this time only winking at the source material.
The defects of the album - not to mention the poorly produced ‘Kanske Ar jag Kar I Dig’ wherein you can hear the blip where the backing vocal sample was looped - haven’t been enough to keep me from playing this album at top volume at home and at work, the chagrin of co-workers be damned. Lekman is reliable to write a few genuine pop gems every year, and even if 12 of them don’t belong together on one disc, the winning moments on Night Falls rival the brief perfection of the Rocky Dennis and Maple Leaves ep’s. It isn’t likely net new fans cold off the streets, but does provide more material for accidental listeners to stumble upon and enjoy (as I did one spring afternoon in ‘04 while accidentally listening to WNUR 89.3 at that serendipitous moment when ‘Black Cab’ got a spin). Goes to show that being a nice guy goes a long way.
Label: Secretly Canadian
Release Date: Oct. 9, 2007 (US)
Rating: 8.5/10
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