Suppose that it’s a clear summer day somewhere in Northern Europe. You’re leaning over the deck of a Baltic ferry, enjoying the first T-shirt weather in months and a little time off work. It’s a good day for staring at the sea, maybe sipping a splash or two of booze cruise rosé. Did I mention you’ve also just been dumped? But what the hell. It feels good to be alone. You’re not even sure where this boat is going, come to think of it. It doesn’t matter. You start wondering how the ups and downs of life have led to things, just now, being so right.
That’s about the best I can do to describe European, the breezy, mature third album by Gothenburg’s civilised indie pop quartet Sambassadeur. With the cool, detached voice of Anna Persson leading the way, the group continue to refine the charmed (and charming) indie pop of their self-recorded debut, the signature single ‘Kate,’ and fine follow-up LP Migration. European is made with considerably more studio resources than its predecessors, but it’s less a big push forward than a confidently grand distillation of what’s worked so far for this band. The sun-kissed piano and lush strings of album opener ‘Stranded’, for example, are wisely careful not to stray toward bombast—a frequent trap bands fall into when suddenly given a bit of a recording budget—allowing louder, more Spectorian tracks that come later (‘Days’ and ‘Sandy Dunes’ in particular) to flower in full widescreen grandeur. While Persson sings ‘loneliness is something you’re accustomed to’, melancholic isolation scarcely sounded so fabulously dynamic.
The album’s quieter middle, however, is where Sambassadeur really shine. ‘Forward Is All’ bubbles and builds with drums and strings to something like the clearest statement yet of a complicated view of romance as futile but unavoidable, and so all the better to carry on: “Love takes your life/Whether you win or lose”. Such sunny fatalism invites comparisons to Abba, and on ‘Albatross,’ the band take the comparison a step further and echo the melody of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ while Persson recounts, “I was happier alone/cut my hair just like a boy…” Surprisingly, the album concludes with a reinvention of Tobin Sprout’s ‘Small Parade’ that somehow seems like a natural coda, of a piece with the finely wrought chamber pop aesthetic developed over the course of the previous eight tracks.
Sambassadeur have raised the bar for indie pop in 2010.
mp3:> Sambassadeur: “Days”
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Great album indeed! And you can buy it here:
http://www.klicktrack.com/klicktrack/releases/sambassadeur/european
this is a fantastic review of a fantastic record. good work joseph.
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