If there's one word that's a constant in descriptions of Swedish
songsmith Stina Nordenstam, it's "mysterious." Like the love interest
in a Haruki Murakami novel, Nordenstam is an enigmatic figure: a
slightly distant, yet mercifully mercurial, girl-with-the-curl, whose
strange ways and irrepressible girlishness combine to make her a figure
onto which sentimental boys can project all of their romanticism.
Mystery, here, is not frightening, but alluring; and Nordenstam's
singing voice — a songbird's warble delivered in the breathiest
whispers — is the sort of instrument that can lure listeners into
song worlds approximating their subconscious, her lilting lullabies
blessed with the narcotic qualities of sleep. And, perchance to dream,
all dreams of Stina on these shores (Australia), of recent, have been of being
able
to find her records in stores; The World Is Saved, Nordenstam's sixth
album, is the first to find release in Australia since her third album,
1995's Dynamite. In the years since, Stina's spun a covers-record turn
worthy of Chan Marshall on 1998's People Are Strange (where she did
Prince, Tim Hardin, and Leonard Cohen, amongst others), and reintroduced
— with a "reinvention" playfully toying with the public identity of
artistry (Nordenstam's willful non-celebrity and tendency to rise above
the music biz adding to the air of "mystery," surely) — herself on
2002's This Is Stina Nordenstam. Again, with The World Is Saved, we're
assured that this is the real Stina; this is the first record for her own, newly-established
record-label, the product of newfound artistic
freedoms, liberation that has let her let her guard down for the first
time in her career. But, of course, even if the music seems intently
intimate, Nordenstam remains at a distance, singing about being behind
glass, about isolation, about being a foreigner in a foreign country,
about endlessly falling, and about metamorphosing into a butterfly. If
this Kafkaesque anguish is symbolizing some nightmarish descent into the
alienation of the modern world, Nordenstam herself is the balm to such
salty sentiment, keeping proceedings, here, particularly playful. With
the sparse programming of Lucky People Centre's David Österberg dressed
in delicate dangles of guitar, warm gurgles of analog organs, and breathy exhalations
of French horn, the set is a delicate collection of
simple, tasteful tunes in which Stina's stunning singing takes center
stage; and her girlish murmurs continue to remain at a distance in only
a teasing sort of way, the way the disc plays out seeming like she's
playing her favorite game.
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