Pelle Carlberg – The Lilac Time

Ahhh. Pelle Carlberg. You make joyous pop music with a slightly twee edge out of bongo’s, xylophones and sweet boy/girl harmonies that detail your everyday life. Tales of getting hit on the nose by people who ask you for cigarettes and you end up giving them a fiver, or looking for a lost youth and being a teenager again. At times your songs have spoken word stories with jingly downbeat pop in the background and some sweet whistling thrown in for good measure. I even think I may have heard a woodblock in the mix too. Your album title is a reference to ‘River Man’ by Nick Drake. You have made my job as a reviewer easy. You went ahead and called the opening track on your album ‘1983 (Pelle and Sebastian)’.

Indeed Mr. Carlberg has made my life easy here, as The Lilac Time, with it’s melancholy indie pop owes pretty much everything to Mr. Murdoch and co. Even the vocals are delivered in his distinctive style. That is not to say that this is not a fine album- in fact far from it- it would probably rate up there with If You’re Feeling Sinister and The Boy With The Arab Strap, and it knocks spots off The Life Pursuit and Dear Catastrophe Waitress. With lyrics taking on mugging, dying Rhinoceri and taking tests on Facebook this is all pretty enough stuff. The real highlight of the album lyrically is the possibly libelous ‘Fly Me To The Moon’. Imagine a jangling pop song, complete with whistling, handclaps and sweeping strings. Then add these lyrics. “On the way we all realised/ that once again we had been booked on the airline of shite”. The chorus to this song is as follows: “I’ll never fly again with you, Ryan/ Never again I swear/ Guess it would kill you to be respectful, friendly or even care.” For this, Mr Carlberg, I salute you.
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Pelle Carlberg on MySpace