When I first got Vince Gallo's When longplayer, I thought that "I Wrote
This Song for the Girl Paris Hilton" was the most beautiful song-titling I'd
ever come across, its straightforward yet fanciful name using such rich and evocative
language, at once confessional, cryptic, authorly, elusive. Only for me to then
discover that there really was, and is, a girl called Paris Hilton, and not only
was, and is, there a girl called Paris Hilton, but, well, then I discovered what
the girl Paris Hilton stood for, and stands for; and soon, with title tainted,
the song itself started to lose its romance, it being now not some mysterious
ode to some mysterious figure (a transient person, perhaps; a girl met fleetingly
in a foreign hotel, now just a memory to cast romantic projections onto), but
just a conduit for Gallo to get his prodigious penis into some piece of prime
pussy. Discovering that there really is a Rocky Dennis isn't quite as heartbreaking,
but the central figure on Swedish songsmith Jens Lekman's two four-song EPs — Maple
Leaves and Rocky Dennis EP — still might've made him seem more
writerly if he'd authored him out of thin air, not stolen him from some pre-extreme-surgery-Cher-starring
based-on-a-true-story motion picture. On his Maple Leaves disc, Lekman
is apparently writing songs in character, but, by the end of the Rocky Dennis
EP, he's in transition, the third song therein titled "Jens Lekman's Farewell
Song to Rocky Dennis". Lekman, as artist, is defined by his croon, a sad-sack
Morrissey-ish moan whose tone colors a range of tunes. The opening title-track
salvo from Maple Leaves introduces such a croon as going hand-in-hand
with very Avalanches-like production, which pulls summery samples of swelling
strings, twittering flutes, and chiming guitars, speeds them up a little, and
works them into a opaque whole whose hissing inconsistency is consistent with
the crackling tonality of dusty vinyl. Later, on such an EP, "Black Cab" finds
him sampling the guitar-line from the Left Banke's "I've Got Something on My
Mind," laying his own McGuinn-styled guitar in chiming tones over the top, Lekman's
lyrics-to-go-with telling a tale of himself (as Rocky Dennis?) ruining the vibe
at a party, then missing the last tram home. The Rocky Dennis EP starts
with another song — "Rocky Dennis Farewell Song to the Blind Girl" —
sampling glistening flute/strings/piano/tuned-percussion and dishing up his dapper
voice out front. In such a postmodern neo-pop presentation, the comparisons could
turn to Erlend Øye, the Kings of Convenience frontman whose time away
from his Garfunkelesque day job finds him crooning electro-pop tunes authored
by hot-shit electrko pr'ducers; or, then, to Magnet, the dorky Norwegian cowboy
who marries busy Sir Dupermann beats to twangy tabletop slide-guitar. But what
makes Lekman great is how he gets his I-wear-black-on-the-outside-because-black-is-how-I-feel-on-the-inside
voice to work wonders in different contexts, both in his woven sample-pastiche
weaves, and in spare, slow, sullen numbers. One wondrous one of those is "Sky
Phenomenon," a mournful piano ballad where his offhand evocation of the northern
lights — "At this time of year/ It's like someone spilled a beer/ All over
the atmosphere" — is strangely profound in its simple sing-song sentiments.
Drawing more lines between the EPs, "Sky Phenomenon" seems to be a sister city
to Rocky Dennis's piano-balladic closer "If You Ever Need a Stranger," the
former song's sad lament "But I would not be accepted/ Because I can't dance
the funky chicken/ I can't dance the funky chicken" treading similar thematic
ground to the latter track's talk of wishing to be a wedding singer as a show
of devotion, thoughts climaxing with the lines "I know every song, you name it/
By Bacharach or David/ Every stupid love song that's ever touched your heart/
Every power ballad that's ever climbed the chart." Whilst you can't always draw
direct parallels between Lekman's words and his ways — what, with the writing
in character, and his use of artistic artifice, and all — it's still safe
enough to assume, from such, that Lekman has long longed to be a songsmith, in
that old-fashioned sense, and that these early discographical forays have been
a lifetime coming.
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