Loney Dear:
Dear John

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Loney Dear’s new record feels utterly Scandinavian

Loney Dear frontman Emil Svanängen has a voice as high and thin as a tightrope. He’s on par with the dude from Band of Horses, and just one octave deeper than the great power-trio frontman Alvin, who—along with his sidemen Simon and Theodore—has long set the benchmark for keening vocal exuberance.

Svanängen’s narrow range isn’t necessarily a problem—singers from Craig Finn to Kenny Chesney have done just fine by staying in their respective zones—but it means that, after a while, Loney feels kind of samey. Listening to large quantities of Loney Dear creates a sort of Doppler effect where everything whizzes by in a blur.

Svanängen’s closest American peers are artists like Bon Iver and Iron & Wine, indie bards who (depending on your perspective) either represent the future of folk music or a kind of hidebound neo-traditionalism—old styles wrapped in new beards. They share Loney Dear’s sense of intimacy, and probably Svanängen’s audience. What they don’t share is a sound. Where Bon Iver and Iron & Wine are rustic, Loney Dear is modern. Look under the hood of Loney’s new record, Dear John, and you’ll find an efficient Swedish engine—pulsing beats, whooshing keyboards, surging melodies. Svanängen may be a singer/songwriter at his core, but his music comes out sounding like electro-folk. It’s lovely and streamlined, the musical equivalent of a Saab.

The record opens with the sound of a droning horn. An instant later, a tricky little rhythm kicks in, with a burbling bass line and handclaps on the upbeat, and then the horn fades out, faint guitar licks enter and Svanängen begins speak-singing a flurry of words. This all happens in the span of about 12 seconds. The song, “Airport Surroundings,” then takes off—little synthy chimes creating pointillist detail. The mood oscillates between ominous and exultant. Mostly, it’s just nervous. The melody eventually drops out altogether, leaving those tiny chimes, droning horn and that persistent mechanized beat. Then it’s on to the second song, “Everything Turns To You,” which starts off with sawing violins and what sounds like a ticking metronome. The mood, again, is nervous. Svanängen harmonizes with himself, claustrophobically, as though no one else is invited to participate. Then keyboard parts come in to fill the empty spaces. The song gets so much bigger that it seems guided by an invisible hand, which eases a giant volume knob clockwise. The melody eventually drops out of this track, too, leaving a faint trail of strings and a clackety beat that sounds like the wheels of a train.

Quivering with energy and packed with ideas, “Airport” and “Everything” make an ideal pair at the top of the album. They set the tone and establish the album’s musical vocabulary. But more importantly, they reveal Svanängen’s very Scandinavian obsession with structure. He’s a formalist, seeming as interested in the shape of his songs as in their content. He builds the melodies like an architect, laying a foundation and then adding elaborate musical latticework. Everything has a function.

Even the ornamental parts contribute to the songs’ trajectory, which is usually upward. Loney Dear songs go a lot of different places, but they’re not exactly twisty-turny. They simply accumulate momentum until they’re no longer earthbound, and then they soar. Some time ago, an enthusiastic Loney Dear fan played me a track called “I Am John,” from 2007’s Loney, Noir, and made a diagonal line in the air with his hand—“It starts out slow and then goes like this,” he said, pointing upward. Later, after he found out I was reviewing this record, he said the same thing about Loney’s overall catalog. I think he’s right, and I share his admiration for the band’s approach. Any group of musicians who can create a sense of liftoff is doing something right. And yet, I wonder whether it’s a songwriting crutch.

There’s a song on the new album called “Harm,” and it’s proof of what can happen when a Loney song fails to take flight. Svanängen’s voice croons over a gently picked guitar, sounding a little too much like Justin Vernon, Sam Beam and the rest of the new-folk gang. “Time didn’t pay attention to me at all / Time didn’t show kindness to me at all,” Svanängen sings, sounding dangerously emo. Loney Dear’s music is usually interesting enough that I barely notice the lyrics—they’re just part of the soundscape. But howlers like that are difficult to ignore.

The same goes for “Harsh Words,” a strummy song I want to believe in, but just can’t. “I tell you, ‘Don’t use harsh words to me, to what I do,’” Svanängen sings. “Tell me I’m good enough, that I could change, that I could change.” Blech. Although the song does eventually pick up with a kick of horns, I’m afraid that “Harsh Words” winds up on the wrong side of the line between sensitivity and whining.

Loney does better on “Violent,” which has hammering drums to rival Doves’ “There Goes The Fear” or even Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown.” And he also succeeds with a song called “I Was Only Going Out,” which starts as a sweet mid-tempo confessional about regret. After a while, a tapping cymbal adds some urgency to the proceedings, and the melody swells and swells until—just as it reaches its breaking point—it tumbles into a wonderful whistling breakdown that stands alongside Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.” You don’t see this moment coming. You don’t want it to end. And if you go back to the song’s beginning and listen closely, you’ll notice Svanängen cleverly set the trap by burying a little whistle deep in the mix. The climactic breakdown, then, isn’t the moment of blissful serendipity it seems to be. It’s a crafty feat of Swedish engineering.

Listen to Loney Dear's "Airport Surroundings" from Dear John: