Sondre Lerche’s new album Phantom Punch (Astralwerks, 2007) contains some of his best songs to date, and overcomes the inertia of complacency afforded by his skills as a songwriting heavy. It’s not clear if it is an ambitious change of course or a flippant departure from the sublime and reserved Duper Sessions (2006), but it comes across as casual and unpretentious, which makes even the lesser parts of the album highly likeable.

Phantom Punch is a louder and more spastic effort than the more controlled (but not boring) albums of yore; a consciously boisterous and noisy response to the inertia of easy listening, which has been the embarrassing fate of other excellent songwriters that lacked the balls to turn up the volume (a la Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, etc.). His heavier-than-usual reliance on the distortion pedal yields questionable results, but is buoyed by well-written songs that stand out from his other work with a boost of much-needed energy.

Unfortunately, track 2, ‘The Tape’, is so unnecessarily hyper that Lerche’s melody and story are lost in the muck, but ‘Well Well Well’ is full of simple riffing and a busy chorus that works to good effect. At first, the tendency is to wish that he had taken a few steps back and stayed closer to the reserved and sublime production of his previous efforts, but the track most similar to Two Way Monologue ‘Tragic Mirror’ is of good stock, but bookeneded by more excited tracks is the least noticeable. It would be nice to hear an slower remix of the disorganized ‘Face the Blood’ so we could figure out what’s happening, but it stands out for shedding the Ben Gibbard meekness that a pretty-boy songwrite use to curry favor with the [poster] buying public.

Even the most raucous tracks are unmistakably from Lerche’s hand, and where the production obfuscates his craft, his role as one of today’s best songwriters is still obvious. The noisy subterfuge works well on the title track, due largely to the disco beat that is so uncharacteristic of Lerche that the other inspired sonic flights help make us more pleasantly disoriented. ‘Say it All’ is the best single on the album, and one of his catchiest so far – major-to-minor twists, lyrics that matter enough to give them room to be heard, and just enough discipline to keep all the elements from bleeding into each other make it so. Greater care could have been taken to combine Lerche’s compositional skills with this more primitive sound, but if turning in a raw effort was his goal then he has succeeded, and wrote some very good songs while he was at it.

Sondre Lerche is one of the few songwriters and musicians in the rock genre that uses jazz chords well, and not to prove that he knows what a major-seventh is, but because nothing else will do. His songs are marked by witty chord progressions and catchy melodies, but the three-note fuzz guitar riffs, studio effects and confusion in Punch assemble a clever and noisy response to the quieter Duper. It would have been much more pretentious if he were trying to establish a new idiom rather than mess around and have fun with distortion and effects pedals, but instead you feel like you are discovering some diamond-in-the-rough hanging out in his garage and fucking around on some great material that is waiting to be discovered.

Release Date: Feb 6, 2007

9 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment