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Rating: This is an album I love, I might not be objective.
The deliberately simple and blatantly melancholic melodies get under your skin like the wounds of love that the Swede tells us about. Unsurprisingly, it's titled "Tattoo". If there's a navel of pop music, this album is remarkably close to it. The atmospheres it evokes are indeed ethereal and timeless, creating images of eternal loves, couples meeting at the airport and kissing while the rest of the world is in chaos. It brings to mind romantic films starring Cary Grant and/or Audrey Hepburn, or the noir film we all wished Rita Hayworth had made.
Let's get to the music: our artist loves both South American rhythms and melancholic melodies from across the Alps. Yet he surpasses them to make them his own and exquisitely pop.
The album opens with a "lacrossian" track with bossa rhythms titled Even in the darkest hour: here’s the theme of eternal love. That Dommage (in French and in English) speaks of the grief of lost love, again with bossa but also electronic rhythms reminiscent at times of Funkstoerung, with whom the blonde protagonist of the album has collaborated. The journey continues with the "crooner-like" Milan Madrid Chicago Paris which instead deals with the quest for eternal love with soundtrack atmospheres from a "Hitchcockian" film, if he were to shoot it today. One of the most passionate tracks is the "goldfrappian" (from the first album!) Lychee where a piano escorts us through Moog evolutions. Intense and "portisheadian" are also Sunshine of your smile and She's mine but I'm not hers.
In the second part, the almost folk, whimsical and nearly hopeful A letter to Lulu Mae stands out. The acoustic yet brief I guess I'm just a fool is beautiful, while Friday at Rex betrays Jay-Jay’s passion for electro eighties.
A mention must go to the track/interrogation titled Jay-Jay Johanson where our artist reels off his personal details to an (overly) enthusiastic and provocative police official.
I already know that any detractors of this album will accuse it of pop flatness, which was actually part of the artist's project, in his intention of universality.
Sometimes the work surpasses the intentions of the entertainer (as he calls himself) and if you too have been moved to tears by singing songs with sentimental and mannered lyrics that perfectly align with how you see your situation... you know what I mean.
Sometimes life and feelings are banal and cruel...
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
13 The Sly Seducer (03:43)
The sly seducer came to town
A time when everything was fine
He turned this idyll upside down
Laid sleezy hands upon what's mine
He's dangerous
The sly seducer, the sly seducer, the sly seducer stole my love
The sly seducer, the sly seducer, the sly seducer stole my love
He captures fragile guileless girls
Vampire-teeth in virgin-necks
And paralyses them with words
Touch upon touch 'til it wrecks
He's dangerous
As the serpents touch
The sly seducer stole my love
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