[rating=9.00]
Ten years ago, night fell over Kortadela. On his vividly colored, sample-heavy 2007 breakthrough LP, Swedish songwriter Jens Lekman juxtaposes vibrant pop with dryly funny quotidian narratives. Lekman is adept at making even the most mundane, fleeting moments seem significant. It helps that he’s a hilarious narrator to boot: on “The Opposite of Hallelujah,” one of Night Falls over Kortadela‘s highlights, he recounts, “I picked up a seashell to illustrate my homelessness / But a crab crawled out of it making it useless.” A herky-jerky drumbeat clashes with lilting strings atop Lekman’s narrative, lifting a droll narrative into sheer pop joy.
On I Know What Love Isn’t, Lekman’s 2012 followup to Night Falls over Kortadela, retains his lyrical quirks while calming down the sonic heteroglossia of its predecessor. The appellation “singer-songwriter” has long been a fair one to use in describing Lekman, but more than any of his other releases I Know What Love Isn’t is his “singer-songwriter album.” Many of that album’s best numbers – the title track, “Erika America,” “Become Someone Else’s” – work well as stripped-down acoustic numbers, as Lekman’s charming Tiny Desk concert evinces. By contrast, something is lost if the flurried strings and sampled beats on the tracks of Night Falls over Kortadela aren’t used in performance.
In the press release for Life Will See You Now, Lekman’s fifth studio record, he writes of I Know What Love Isn’t, “I went on tour and it was tough because that album was delicate and sad and understandably not as popular as Night Falls Over Kortedala. So going on tour and playing that album live was tough. A lot of shows were half-full and some nights it just felt like everyone was waiting to hear the old songs.” I Know What Love Isn’t is a significant but not complete break from the album that came before it, yet in Lekman’s account many perceived it as a diversion from an inimitable sound, rather than a variation on a pre-existing theme. When on I Know What Love Isn’t‘s title track Lekman sings, “I hate bands / It’s always packed with men spooning their girlfriends / Clutching their hands as if they let go / Their feet would lift from the ground and ascend,” it requires little effort on the part of the listener to link that story-song with those on Night Falls over Kortadela.
Life Will See You Now will appeal to those who, upon hearing I Know What Love Isn’t, yearned for the high quirk factor of Night Falls over Kortadela. But Life Will See You Now is also a clear product of its predecessor, particularly at the level of composition. Night Falls over Kortadela is defined by a patchwork songwriting technique, with layers of samples and instrumentation glued next to each other like letters on a ransom note. By contrast, Life Will See You Now is equally as colorful – perhaps even more so – but its songwriting is more organic. The presence of more live instruments ends up being a linchpin in Life Will See You Now‘s greatest success: synthesizing Night Falls over Kortadela with I Know What Love Isn’t, taking the strongest elements of both and melding them together. The result is Lekman’s finest album to date.
Throughout the ten tracks of Life Will See You Know, you’ll rarely have the impulse to skip a track. The suspenseful guitar riff on lead single “What’s that Perfume You Wear?” builds into a chorus that explodes with steel drums. The ebullient “To Know Your Mission” opens with the broad sweep of a Broadway musical, albeit one tempered by Lekman’s lyrical precision. After remembering a Mormon missionary he saw walking through Gothenburg one morning, Lekman moves to the broader question of finding meaning in one’s life, all the while finding the time to throw in the line, “Will Smith, Puff Dady, Gala, Chumbawamba.” The somber, piano-led late album cut “Postcard #17” is one of Lekman’s best reflective moments, capturing him in a bout of writer’s block: “I couldn’t even write about it in my diary / Or shape the sound of the words.”
In the stacked tracklisting of Life Will See You Now, Lekman saves the best for the middle, which helps keep up the snappy pace of the album as it comes to its conclusion. The irrepressibly catchy “Wedding at Finistère”, anchored on an synthetic horn riff, features the album’s best chorus, bound to induce conga lines at “alternative” weddings for years to come: “I asked how she was feeling / She said, ‘Like a five year old watching the ten year olds shoplifting / Ten year old watching the 15 year olds French kissing / 15 year old watching the 20 year olds chain-smoking / 20 year old watching the 30 year olds vanishing.” Conga lines even get a direct shout-out on the following track, the disco-inflected “How We Met, The Long Version,” on which Lekman tells “the long version” of a relationship. Lekman, ever himself, takes “long version” to mean tracing the relationship back to its origins in the Big Bang, the evolutionary unfolding of the universe, and eventually the early days of the human species. He begins with, “Nothing became something / Turned itself inside out,” a cosmological event whose ultimate result, for Lekman, involves him meeting a woman and asking if he can borrow her bass guitar.
“The title [Life Will See You Now] came last second before deadline,” Lekman said of his new record. “I was panicking about that and I had a conversation about it with my girlfriend. She said, ‘Just describe to me what the album is about’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s about these people and it’s like they’re sitting in a waiting room waiting for life to start and then the nurse comes out and says “life will see you now.”‘” The characters of Life Will See You Now are in various stages of life, but in Lekman’s hands their stories make it seem like they’ve already seen life. Vivified by the sharpest pop of Lekman’s career, the people populating Life Will See You Now will stick with you long after the music’s run out.
