Jens Lekman, and fixing what will always be broken

No. 1436: Jens Lekman - The Linden Trees Are Still in Blossom

When Jens Lekman announced reissues of two of his most celebrated albums in 2022, it had been a little while since I checked in with the Swedish singer/songwriter. I hadn’t listen to his last album, a 2019 collaboration with Annika Norlin based on letters, or the one before that, though his 2012 album I Know What Love Isn’t is still pretty underrated if you ask me. But in the late ‘00s, I listened to his music a lot. I saw him live three times in the span of about 18 months, and his album Night Falls on Kortedala was an easy favorite of 2007.

Then once I made the transition from CD buyer to committed record guy, I… never saw his records in shops. At least not the ones I really fell in love with. There’s a reason for that: those albums featured a lot of samples. A LOT of samples, most of them cribbed from records he’d bought at swap meets and such. But eventually the reality of clearing those samples became an obstacle for keeping those albums on streaming and in print. In interviews he did at the time, he said that it was like they “never existed.” Which is a weird and sad thought, but all too real when the only mark of a work of art’s endurance in this age is its digital footprint. So he re-recorded the songs that couldn’t be cleared, or replaced elements of them, and then re-released two albums under different names with slightly different titles.

The Linden Trees Are Still In Blossom is the reworked version of Night Falls on Kortedala, and there are some noticeable differences in certain songs, the one that comes to mind being the arrangement of “Shirin.” Though these songs still essentially sound like you remember them; its companion record, The Cherry Trees Are Still in Blossom, features entirely new versions of “Maple Leaves” and “Black Cab” that are nearly unrecognizable from their early forms. And they’re beautiful, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still prefer the original version of “Maple Leaves.” What a song! 

But ultimately this is less about the changes than what I loved about the songs in the first place. In the ‘00s, Lekman was compared frequently to Jonathan Richman or Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields because of his mixture of wit, naivete and poignancy, and I can’t disagree really. All of these songs have a mix of all of these elements at differing ratios, and his sense of humor doesn’t take the sadness out of their depictions of heartbreak, but they make them a little more relatable. 

One song I always return to is “Your Arms Around Me,” which is not a song about heartbreak with a laugh track but rather a love song wrapped in gauze. (Literally!) It actually tells a fairly mundane but, if it’s happening to you, unpleasant story about making dinner and cutting open his finger while slicing avocado. It’s not a high drama love song, and I find that the appeal of those kinds of songs wanes when you’re not a teenager anymore; these days, it’s the quiet glimpses of something more enduring that hit me the hardest. But this song has one of the best couplets he’s ever written, in the form of some cryptic words of comfort from his partner that read like a koan: “What’s broken can always be fixed/What’s fixed will always be broken.” Which is kind of true of this album, too, a beautiful record forever altered that’s nonetheless lost none of its impact.  Rating: 9.3

No. 1437: Liars - Drum’s Not Dead

One of the benefits of being able to live with an album for a long time, particularly one that you started listening to when it was new, is that over that span of time you learn more about the music that shaped it. While nobody necessarily wants their music to be called “derivative,” all music is to a degree, and it’s those artists who interpret their influences in interesting ways and perhaps introduce listeners to more great music that are worth treasuring, rather than, say, a band who’s basically a carbon copy of another band. (Sometimes that’s fine though—any band that sounds like Bolt Thrower will hear no complaints from me.)

Liars are a fascinating band in this context, as they’ve essentially never made the same record twice, and each one has a different frame of reference, but zero of them are pure pastiche. I’ll be writing about several of them in the coming months, so I’ll go into more detail on a record-by-record basis, but let’s start with my favorite Liars record, Drum’s Not Dead.

Liars went from being a quintet on their debut, which was kind of a noisy dancepunk record, to eventually slimming down to a trio and making the most of their streamlined setup. As of right now Liars is, to my knowledge, just Angus Andrew and whoever he’s touring with, but on this record, the core trio brought a more stark and primitive approach to their sound, and by avoiding the overcrowding, they let the songs breathe and ended up delivering the best album of their career.

The opening trio of songs is stunning, from the tense ambiance of “Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack!” to the noise-drone frenzy of “Let’s Not Wrestle Mt. Heart Attack” to the sparse post-punk dirge “A Visit from Drum.” And closer “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack” is their prettiest song by some distance. I think at the time it made sense to kind of draw parallels between this album and the weirdo experimentalism of Animal Collective, but I hear it today, 20 years later, and I hear closer connections to the first album by This Heat, or perhaps Can when they ease off the funk. None of which takes anything away from what Liars created here, a masterpiece from where I’m sitting. And furthermore, my appreciation of this record has only grown as well. 

Side note: This is a 2022 reissue when Mute was getting the whole Liars discog back in print, and it’s super eco-conscious, with recycled plastic used for the record and an eco-friendly clear sleeve…which is kinda noisy and falling apart. But I appreciate the effort! Rating: 9.4

No. 1438: Akimbo - Jersey Shores

Back when Seattle noise rock group Akimbo released Jersey Shores in 2008, it ticked off a lot of boxes for me: gnarly noise rock epics? Check. Released on Neurot? Check. Recorded by Steve Albini? Check. And it’s a concept album about the early 20th century shark attacks on the Jersey Shore? You better believe that’s a check.

And all that stuff is still as appealing to me as it was 18 years ago. Jersey Shores rips. There’s perhaps a parallel to Mastodon’s Leviathan in that they’re both loud, heavy records about beasts from the ocean, though this one is actually based on true stories! But musically it’s a little more in the vein of KEN Mode or Harvey Milk when they’re really cooking. (Not, for instance, the more slow and excruciating Harvey Milk tracks, awesome as those are.) Also the vinyl version was released on Alternative Tentacles and not Neurot, and has an alternate cover. This one has sharks! 

But really, I don’t feel like I need to oversell this one. It’s a heavy and loud record about shark attacks. What more do you need to know? Rating: 9.1

No. 1439: Fucked Up - Hidden World

If you had suggested to me 20 years ago that a band called Fucked Up would have one of the most enduring legacies of 21st century hardcore, I probably wouldn’t have believed you, but only two years later I could see that’s where they were going. The band was already making something epic and ambitious with 2008’s The Chemistry of Common Life that suggested they were going to keep getting bigger with their aims, which is pretty much true. They’re as much a prog band as a hardcore band, really more a prog band if we’re being honest, and their Chinese Zodiac series really leans into that aspect of their music. Plus the One Day albums, made with the intent of writing an entire album’s worth of songs in 24 hours, emphasize that even on a smaller scale their ambition is skyhigh.

But Hidden World, their full-length debut, is as close to a straightforward punk/hardcore record as they released (not counting early singles) and it’s not even really that close. It’s long, for one, with more than its share of five- and six-minute songs. And some intricate conceptual threads for that matter. But it’s also just an album full of rippers: “Two Snakes,” “Crusades,” and especially “Baiting the Public.” I heard that at a brewery where my band was playing a few years ago, shortly before we were set to play, and it was good fuel for the performance. 

Hidden World was caught up in some rights limbo for a while because it was originally released on Jade Tree, a label that eventually folded (and then came back and then folded again, or something like that), so it took a while to end up back in print, but I think the band released it themselves on their own FU label, and you know, albums that go this hard need to stay in print for the greater good. But its reissue was also a good reminder that, even early on, Fucked Up set their sights much higher than basement matinee level. Rating: 9.2

No. 1440: Dream Unending - Song of Salvation

Who’s ready to feel bad? That actually might not be the most accurate way to begin here, but doom metal is about feeling bad, and there’s plenty of melancholy and sadness to be found on Dream Unending’s second album, Song of Salvation. But that’s also not the whole of it. There’s tenderness and softness on this album, emotions that you don’t hear so much in gnarlier metal records. And that’s significant, because one of the members of the band is Derrick Vella of Tomb Mold, who made a couple of pretty gnarly death metal records on their own, before finding some jazz-fusion grooves and brighter moments of beauty on 2023’s The Enduring Spirit. And maybe this was, in part, a bridge to that?

But Song of Salvation is one of the prettiest metal albums I’ve ever heard. There are big riffs and lots of more conventional doom metal sounds, but a lot of it explores entirely different terrain, finding inspiration in decidedly un-metal things. I kind of love that, because as much as I love a death metal album that’s nothing more, nothing less, and nothing else, I also love when metal dares to be something entirely different. Like, for instance, beautiful. Which this record most certainly is. 

I interviewed Vella back around the release of this album, and his perspective was essentially that they wanted to be able to explore things that they didn’t with their other projects (drummer/vocalist Justin DeTore is also in Sumerlands and Magic Circle), which lends Dream Unending to more personal and vulnerable terrain: “It’s OK to feel sentimental, it’s OK to talk about joy and love, and things you don’t encounter so much in metal. That’s just how we feel, and it’s true to us.” I love a metal album that dares to be different and I love the hell out of this record. Rating: 9.1