Without any doubt Jens Lekman has got a particular talent. His easy-listening folk-pop music, guitar-based and with heavy use of samples and strings, has in the last years become object of attentions not only by a strict and reserved audience. Compared to Belle & Sebastien, The Magnetic Fields, he’s now releasing (it will be out on February 17th) his fourth LP under Secretly Canadian and eventually named, ‘Life Will See You Now’. Born in Angered, Gothenburg (Sweden) on February 6, 1981, the Swedish singer-songwriter and musician describes his new record as a ‘thirties-crisis disco album’ willing in this sense to underline its existentialist contents like they could be eventually considerations about his present life and what he did in the past. A definition that will on the other hand mislead the listeners if they are expecting by this record to listen to something eventually depressing or even boring. ‘Life Will See You Now’ in fact, far from being a depict of a regretful existence, has the proposal to be a personal album, and it is of course because of the contents of the songs, but at the same time it is perhaps the most pop and easy-listening record made by Jens Lekman, this time at work on the recording process with producer Ewan Pearson, previously known because his works with M83, The Chemical Brothers, Goldfrapp. Who knows. Perhaps this happened properly for the same reasons why it would had eventually happened the opposite. Like he, looking for balancing depth of emotional expression with droll and often self-deprecating detail, finally figured out in realising what’s definitely a pop album tout-court. Introducing also new elements into his songs, his traditional folk pop sound (‘How Can I Tell Him’, ‘What’s That Perfume That You Wear’) got innovated with a certain calypso and seventies vintage taste which made me think in the most occasion to an artist like Rufus Wainwright (‘To Know Your Mission’, ‘Hotwire The Ferris Wheel’) and new rhythms out from the bossa nova and sounds of wind instruments like trumpets (‘Postcard #17’, ‘How We Met, The Long Version’). The result in the complex it’s an album apparently vintage but in concrete proposing a certain aesthetic theory tipically indie and that even admitting the skills and the abilities of this artist, makes me feel perplexed about the fact the majority of the listeners are not at this point bored about.
Rating: 5/10
