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Sondre Lerche emerged
from Bergen, Norway three years ago at the age of eighteen with his
debut album, Faces Down. The youngest of four siblings, he grew up on
classic 1980s pop and began learning the guitar at the age of eight.
He wrote his first song at 14 and was playing acoustic nights in a
Bergen club when he wasn’t even legally old enough even to be in
there. By the time he was 17, he was signed to Virgin Norway. A
smattering of EPs introduced him to the Norwegian charts. But the
release of his debut album Faces Down, recorded in 2000, was
deliberately delayed until after he had finished school the following
year.
Ambitious, diverse and
packed full of gorgeous melodies tempered with tougher edges, Faces Down
was the perfect antidote to the manufactured synthetic pop choking the
joy and imagination out of modern music. As impossible to categorize as
you would imagine from a list of influences
that include Burt
Bacharach, Jeff Buckley, High Llamas, Elvis Costello, Steely Dan, Beck
and Cole Porter, the album was an instant hit in Norway and critically
well-received in Europe, Britain and America, where it made one of
Rolling Stone’s top 50 albums of 2002. Extensive touring further
enhanced Sondre’s reputation, with a Billboard review of a live show in
New York praising his “gorgeous folk-pop melodies, goose-bump-generating
vocals and astounding finger-work on the guitar.”
Now he’s fulfilled all
the promise of his precocious debut with Two Way Monologue, an audacious
second album of astonishing maturity and vividly melodic songs. From
the fragile acoustics of the melancholic “It’s Too Late” to the almost
symphonic variations of the title track and on to the uplifting shiny
pop candy of “On The Tower,” it’s an album of breath-taking diversity
and imagination that refreshes popular music as a creative force.
Like its predecessor,
Two Way Monologue was recorded once again in Bergen by HP Gundersen and
Jørgen Træen (Jaga Jazzist/ Kaizers Orchestra/ Magnet) with the same
core band, known as The Faces Down. According to Sondre, they were
central to the spirit of the album. “I wanted the band performance to be
the basis of most of the songs. That’s what makes them shine,” he says.
“We rehearsed alot and did demos and it really paid off. The swing of
the musicians playing together is probably what I’m most happy about on
the record.”
Then he added two
self-produced, home-recorded, non-band songs. “Overkill is not an option
and I wanted to balance the record. On the first album I was into easy
listening and wide-screen arrangements. If it wasn’t packed with strings
and synths I didn’t want to know.”
“This time I felt I’d
proved I could write tidy, well-crafted pop songs. I wanted to
challenge myself more and to write songs that were less predictable in
structure and more relaxed. I think the songs are intrinsically richer
and more diverse. But I tried to give them space to breathe. I wanted to
let the air fill the songs. So I made it a bit more minimalist.”
Both sonically and
lyrically, there’s plenty of finely wrought detail. “I worked very
intensely on the lyrics and I’m proud enough to print them in the
booklet, which I didn’t feel comfortable about last time,” says Sondre.
Just as much attention
went into the arrangements, from the accordion on “Maybe You’re Gone” to
the pedal steel on “Stupid Memory” via the French horn on the
instrumental “Love You.” But such embellishments were always for sound
musical reasons, not simply for show. “The record had to be directed by
my own ambition and ability and not by the budget. I was determined not
to get carried away,” Sondre insists.
Which perhaps explains
his insistence on remaining in Bergen, when the brighter lights of Oslo
and beyond beckoned. “I can’t tell you how great the music scene is,” he
enthuses. “I’m amazed at the music being made in Bergen. It’s creative
and inspiring. No way was I going to New York to record when we’ve got
it all back home.”
As for the influences,
anyone looking for clues can find them in the small print of the “thank
yous” in the album’s liner notes - the Beach Boys
(“but more Surf’s Up
and Sunflower than Pet Sounds this time”), Prefab Sprout’s Paddy McAloon,
the Brazilian composer Milton Nascimento and Brian Wilson collaborator
Van Dyke Parks’ legendary cult album, “Song Cycle.” The result is an
album that sounds like little else in the contemporary pop firmament,
although Rufus Wainwright and Ed Harcourt (two other adventurous
singer-songwriters who refuse to fit snugly into the conventional
troubadour mode) are perhaps the closest comparisons.
“I was nervous about
whether these songs were as good as the first record,” Sondre admits.
“Faces Down came from that first uplifting rush of spontaneous
inspiration in discovering that you can write songs. But you can never
go back to that place. After that, you have to work at the gift you’ve
been given. You’re more self-conscious and you have to fight back.” On
Two Way Monologue, Sondre Lerche emerges victorious.
“It’s all about the song,” he says. “It’s not about anything else. If I don’t feel strongly about the song I couldn’t record it.” Crisis? What crisis?
~Courtesy of
Astralwerks |
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