Bedroom pop records are a dime a dozen these days. Those hopeless guys who
used to sit around at parties strumming acoustic guitars and making eyes at
the popular girls (who were all off in corners with jocks) are making CDs
at an alarming rate. Still, for every 100 folk-altered,
electronically-enhanced songwriter CDs, there's going to be at least a
couple of good ones. Martin Gustafsson, a Swede who grew up listening to
Kiss, has made one of these, achieving something like Elliott Smith's
critical balance between bile and sincerity, melody and
experimentation. His first line, "Give me peace or give me a piece of
ass," out of "Blocks," lets you know that while Gustafsson is going
to sing about frustrated love, just as roughly 600 songwriters will this
week, he's going to do it with a level of skill and self-awareness that
just might rescue it from sameness.
The disc is culled from some 200 recordings made since Gustafsson's last
album, and he selects and orders its cuts with careful skill. Although
these songs are clearly one man's work, they are augmented, most of the
time, with diverse sounds — not just guitar, piano and voice, but also
cello, violins, saxophone, and field recordings. The three "Black Tango"
songs are perhaps the most experimental element of this varied disc, short,
sample-ridden intervals of strings, glockenspiel, computer tones and
breath. They, along with brief, wonderfully pretty piano excursions ("Open
the Door, Grigori" and "Rescue Me, Pianohead"), provide a frame for the
more structured songs, allowing them to emerge in raspy, lo-fi glory from
the soundscape.
"Flash in the Tunnel" is one of the best of the songs, very Elliott
Smith-ish in its whispery vocals, anchored by pounding drums and lavished
with real and electronically generated string tones. "My Midnight We'll
Give It a Go" is built on more conventional acoustic strumming, yet it
lifts off this structure with soaring, almost falsetto vocals. And
"Explode," with its delicate picked guitars alternating with blasts of
fuzz-toned feedback, contains some of the disc's best lyrics. Here
Gustafsson slips images of sharks and mermaids into its lament for a broken
love, singing in a fluttery, desperate tone that might remind you, a
little, of Holopaw. "Leafless" gains intensity from Emelie Moline's
swooping cello and delicate voice, an island of uneasy melody before the
abrasive bass and drum machines of "The Claw."
The disc closes with an
achingly pretty "Nobody's Fault," a lush mesh of strings and voice that
follows the same chord progression as Pachelbel's Canon. "It's nobody's
fault/ That we're not riding wheels of joy/ Our walls will break/ And the
silence will break/ Just like a sharp razorblade," sings Gustafsson,
balancing naked sincerity and orchestral ambition for a tricky moment, then
subsiding into silence.
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