
(Polyvinyl)
!!! A+ RECORDING !!! [originally hr]
I adore this record. When it came out I had no idea who the Swedish punk band Love Is All were and listened based on reviews, and it ingratiated itself with me immediately. It's one of those pieces of art that screams out in pure joy at the unpredictability of its own inscrutable emotional state. It's an entire album about the importance of keeping one's heart open -- and the full recognition that doing so will frequently and inevitably result in pain. And although it's witty and clever, it's never cerebral -- giving in to complete physical exuberance at the same time as it probes and thrills in its sensitive, cathartic, honest and invariably kind-hearted lyrics. Like I said, my defenses fall completely down for this one: I love this record and all of these songs so very, very much.
All these years later, of course, I do know who Love Is All are: an unusual ensemble with saxophone, keys and a lead vocalist whose punk squeaked under pressure like Poly Styrene's but just as often soared into delicate back-and-forth with her gang of fellow enthusiasts. I also know that they had already released two excellent, improbably consistent albums two and four years before this one, yet this is one that shot straight into my heart and has remained there. A bloghype in the mid-2000s that perversely experienced diminishing returns after signing to a bigger label (Polyvinyl), they're one of the scattered bands that, even as I've worked harder to vary and expand my field of study when exploring new music, I have sought out all sorts of information about and obsessed over like I did with various alt-rock behemoths when I was a teenager. Information has been thin on the ground ever since the wheels began to come off the indie rock joyride, but I've championed them whenever possible, but unfortunately my celebration of them seems to have come just as the twilight of their short career hit. No matter; such disappointments are just the sort of poignant blow that would inspire a well-turned lyric from Josephine Olausson herself -- the sensation of being the only one carrying a torch for something that then all but disappears into the ether, but also the sensation, however phony, that it's something that exists just for you.
Love Is All's third and (probably) final album comes out bursting with as much energy and passion as its two predecessors (both also with numbers in the title, as if desperate to map out the heart with something so dull and dependable as mathematics), but now more than ever before there is the hint of needs not being met, of yearning. It's all bashful smiles, weird crushes, consciously unproductive sulking -- only now you're an adult. This description makes it sound like some silly pop-punk journey into the shallow desperation of late adolescence and early twenties; at the time, a handy comparison was Best Coast's much more lyrically one-dimensional Crazy for You. Not that there's anything automatically wrong with self-indulgence, but this ain't it: Olausson's lyrics court us as participants, not as mere recipients of her venting. She lays herself bare as an act of empathy, expecting and even knowing that she is sharing experiences we know as well as she does; that she and the band do so with such irrepressible warmth and match it with bashed-out, furious, hook-filled mayhem allows for emotional dimensions to their sound that are unusual for indie rock and ridiculously rare for punk. The transcendent wisdom and humanity on display here, especially in regard to human relationships and private anxieties, is a revelation because it makes explicit the two-way conversation inherent to the best rock & roll, from Big Star's "What's Going Ahn" to the Supremes' "Back in Your Arms Again": that the context in which your problems are small and irrelevant does not matter to us, that these frailties are not just universal but are the meaning of everything. It calls to mind a lyric by another master, Tracey Thorn: "Is this as grown-up as we ever get? Maybe this is as good as it gets. Years may go by, but I think the heart remains a child."
But enough about all that; what hits you first is the pure empowering rush of it all, the record's simple, balls-out beauty and charm, and the pop bliss tempered brilliantly by Olausson's flagrantly overextended singing. The relentless bass and mega power pop riffage that kick off "Bigger Bolder," joined quickly by a tasty guitar and later by cacophonous saxophone and feedback, serve to introduce us to a big, inexhaustible love, not necessarily that of our heroine for any one person but the one residing inside of her ready to be matched, received and given to. As the Box Tops once sang, it's too big to hide and it can't be denied; and as Olausson sings, exploding with pleasure, "there's no sense trying to make this smart, I simply hate every minute that we're apart." The irony is, of course, that that line is itself as smart as pop music gets, as smart as you'd really want it to get. The rest of the songs are either about the residual consequences of this unguarded moment or are just the musings of someone who longs for what "Bigger, Bolder" serves to capture. Over on the second half is "Again, Again," which is almost the opening track's twin, coming out swinging in much the same way, despite being much slower; the words also are much less eager and frenzied -- "the phone rings now and then, again again, it's never you" -- but the common ground is in the sheer conviction of it all, and ultimately in the frantic tones of Olausson's vocal as the song climaxes with her perfectly rendered dejection. She stays up until late and embraces this brokenness as willingly as she does the unfathomable possibilities of "Bigger, Bolder," and the rest of the band -- guitarist Nicholaus Sparding, bassist Johan Lindwall, drummer Markus Görsch, saxophonist James Ausfahrt -- file in to render her dreams and demons in three dimensions.
The put-upon protagonist Olausson conveys her struggles with Charlie Brown-level mishaps all through the record: panic attacks on "Repetition," a sloppy house that overwhelms her on "Dust," all manner of physical ailments and injuries on the magnificent "Early Warnings," and maybe most throttling of all, running into an ex at a party on "Less Than Thrilled." In all cases, with consistent sympathy and perspicacity, the songs and their arrangements tell Olausson's stories remarkably well through nonverbal means; all of these mini-narratives take their shape thanks to the songs and performances, like "Don't Worry Baby" or the Diodes' version of "Red Rubber Ball." Sparding's towering guitar line on the urgent, bass-driven "Repetition" and the sax and wildass punk riffing of "Early Warnings," just for instance, push these songs out right at you and encourage a mutual understanding of how your participation in these tantrums, brooding sessions and dance parties validates them at the same time it validates you. (Listen to the sheer effortless synchronicity the band shares on "Less Than Thrilled," or the parade-like marching chorus on "Dust," a song that should've put Fang Island and Japandroids out of business, that eventually coalesces around an irresistible keyboard line and the flummoxed homeowner's rallying cry: "I want and I need to be rid of these things!")
Nevertheless, these boisterous anthems would mean less without the multiple dimensions brought to them by the lyrics; the post-post-breakup narrative "Less Than Thrilled" is perhaps the quintessential Olausson lyric, with its humility and resentment, each doubting the other, that register as perfectly human. This is also one of the cases in which the band is intentionally subdued and modest in order to give additional space to the intricacies in the vocals, including the band's background ooohs. "False Pretense" takes a different approach to spaciousness by dramatically staggering its towering drums and sporadic bass in a sonic demand to be pumped up; it's a perfect groove, with Olausson splendidly, fully, almost obnoxiously in herself as she aims torpedoes at a pompous enemy, "a twisted crook with a twisted quick look." Just as relentless an earworm is "Early Warnings," and yet again, it's Olausson who douses it in idiosyncratic character, rendering it the ultimate bad day anthem (smashes her head on a bookshelf, slips on a bar of soap, has trouble with her tights, chokes on her toothbrush, and more and more) that provides ample space for us all to enjoy our revenge when she comes back firing on all cylinders at the bridge, naming off every catastrophe she can think of like Michael Stipe in "Imitation of Life" but on a much more charmingly micro scale: "nosebleeds, head bumps, broken noses, bruises and cotton strings!" The story doesn't resolve itself in half-hour television convenience, but it does in its sheer explosive restlessness confront all these frustrations on its own terms, and walks away triumphant; the rest of the band rolls in to help Olausson save the day, more than anything through their defiant, almost unadorned ba-ba-badadadada chanting.
Elsewhere, there are various touches that show Love Is All's increasing eclecticism, a cycle I'm sorry we never got to see taken further. "The Birds Were Singing with All Their Might" experiments with the sonic possibilities of trying to expand the band's modest instrumental arrangement to encompass the towering mood of shoegaze; it ends up sounding like the title is fully accurate and Olausson couldn't be more thrilled about the situation. "Kungen," Olausson's engrossing anecdote about running into royalty while on a city bus ride ("it was such an unusual sight") is met with full-on '60s psychedelia, the whole band singing their lungs out and suddenly evocative of Spanky & Our Gang or the Free Design, flying like kites out over the city. A similar pop fantasy lights up "Never Now," which employs flutes and guitar together to back up a heavy groove and Olausson's most resigned vocal -- the refrain may or may not be "hurry up and wait," a cliché that sounds like a boldly resigned truth under these circumstances, so wistful you could cry -- with an infinite soundscape that repeatedly returns to earth with rock & roll catharsis. Later, they sample Pachelbel and explore sensuality (the whispered "I waited forever") on "Take Your Time," which lilts gently into oblivion at the record's conclusion.
Best of all is "A Side in a Bed," slighty hip hop and synthpop-infected through its keyboards and programmed drums and deliberately showing off, until its stunning climax, restraint enough to a set a stage upon which we can catch every nuance of Olausson's vocal (plus its sweet, wordless answer at the conclusion) and solemn but improbably mature lyric about all of the domestic realities and symbols of long-term, homespun love a single person may long for: dirty dishes for two, hands to be held, a seat at a table, a lap to rest one's head on, and most of all, to be somebody's favorite. Like "Again, Again," it's a song that embraces the reality of loneliness while objecting to it with every fiber of its being. Unafraid of the human impulse toward being wanted and needed, it's one of the most unabashedly romantic celebrations of the mundane and traditional since Gram Parsons' "Blue Eyes" ("chores to keep me busy," "a pretty girl who loves me with the same last name as mine"), and it stings because -- not necessarily for everyone, but for the people to whom and for whom Olausson is speaking -- it's so insanely right and true and correct.
I feel guilty whenever these album reviews devolve into personal reminiscence; I doubt that's what any of you come here for, but let me very briefly say this: as someone who has had moments when I lived, worked, existed alone and felt I was making far too much of my distaste for it. It is enormously validating to hear a pop song that celebrates the comfort of just being loved, one that understands why you miss it if you don't currently have it. We're so trained, often correctly, to locate strength in ourselves to go on when things are bad, or to just suck up certain feelings and try to exist apart from them. So to hear someone who's clearly a wonderful artist just throw back the currents and say it all -- that you want to do the laundry and clean the sheets with somebody else again, that you want a "song" with someone, that you want to wake up next to someone -- without the fear of sounding needy or crazy or uncomfortably sincere, it means a hell of a lot to me. It feels validating in a way that almost nothing I heard when I was actually in a bad, lonely place did. Even as much as I am willing to gush about this entire record, I feel so grateful for this song specifically.
Since 2010, life has presumably gone on for Love Is All, but not really in public. Original sax player Fredrik Eriksson died in late 2010. They haven't tweeted since I followed them around the same time. They post updates on Facebook occasionally, but never about any forthcoming activity. They played one-off shows in Sweden in 2012 and 2017 (!) and one in France in 2015, but haven't toured in eight years. When I started to worry about the complete silence around 2013, I bought a shirt from Polyvinyl as a show of solidarity; it was too small for me but I wore it at Walt Disney World once, and everyone thought it was a Beatles thing. James Ausfahrt lives in New York now and puts music on Bandcamp with some regularity; he writes great songs that seem to yearn for a larger stage that's now denied them. In 2012, he sent a cryptic tweet that sheepishly asked if anyone was looking for a saxophone player; not a good sign. Olausson has written occasional record reviews for Sonic Magazine, which obviously does nothing but enhance my feeling of intense identification with her work; they are in Swedish, but even roughly translated by Google, they sound like her lyrics -- regarding the Radio Dept.'s Running Out of Love: "It sounds cozy, warm, groovy and sometimes sleepy. It is fluffy dance music that smoothes and blinks." On Ariel Pink's Dedicated to Bobby Jameson: "Each small note is placed in perfect order." On Cat Power's You Are Free: "Chan Marshall is a strange creature. Her shyness and stage fear are widely known. As she stands in front of the audience, the long bang that obscures the view appears to be her best friend and patron. It often feels like she would want to sink through the floor."
This is hardly a new sentiment for this blog. But why is it always these bands that slip through the cracks? You know the ones I mean, but if you don't: let's say, the Only Ones. The Go-Betweens. St. Etienne. All of these have larger audiences than Love Is All ever did, all are cult bands with reasonably sized legacies, but you know perfectly well that none of them are part of any publication's aggregate poll. What they all share is a certain modesty of spirit that conceals an almost impossible potential for beauty and connection; because they are never out to further a narrative or prove any far-reaching ideological point, they exist like a William Wyler or Frank Borzage film to just offer comforting expression and the bearing of witness, on their part as well as on the listener's. I miss Love Is All. There will never be enough bands like this. And to me, the most terrifying thing is that if the marketplace can't sustain a band this good, can it ever sustain any band like this for long? I don't wish to think about the answer. But I hope more than anything that something -- word of mouth, random archival writeups like this, the simple supernatural force of enthusiasm -- keeps this record alive, kick-starts it, lets people find it. Not only do the album and the band deserve that, so do the audiences that never happened to hear them.