Pages tagged “sondre lerche”

Giddy Norwegian songwriter goes punk, sort of

Norwegian songwriter Sondre Lerche first popped up in the U.S. in 2002, with the release of Faces Down, a curious collection of spry, jubilant pop songs as inspired by 1980s European radio as Bossa Nova, British folk and Tin Pan Alley. With his smooth vocals and crisp arrangements, Lerche sounded anachronistic but modern, like a retro-kitsch microwave in a ripe shade of avocado green: ridiculous, a tiny bit tacky, but strangely comforting all the same.

Phantom Punch, Lerche's fourth full-length since signing with Virgin Norway in 2000, is also his grittiest, least-ethereal long-player to date. Produced by Tony Hoffer (who has twiddled knobs for Beck, Belle and Sebastian, Grandaddy and Air) in Los Angeles last spring, Phantom Punch features Lerche's latest backing band, The Faces Down Quartet, and a shocking number of distorted guitar riffs and almost-hollers. Phantom Punch is hardly seething garage rock, but tracks like the effects-soaked "The Tape" sound more like Hot Hot Heat than Serge Gainsbourg, and Lerche repeatedly eschews his trademark guise (jaunty, wistful ditties, sometimes with orchestration, always with a jazz inflection) for scrappier, yelpier renderings.

Several of these tracks were cut live, and Phantom Punch feels appropriately brash and immediate: opener "Airport Taxi Reception" sees Lerche's fey cooing hit brisk guitar and a hip-swinging chorus, with Lerche pining persuasively ("I left my mind at the airport / My thoughts in the taxi / My heart at reception / The last thing I saw was you"). Likewise, "Face the Blood" is full of almost-punk guitar and thrashing drums, with Lerche twisting his perfect croon into a convincing growl. You'll feel less like politely nodding your Beret-topped head and flicking a hand-rolled cigarette, and more like throwing your elbows around and dancing like an awkward American, equal parts sweaty and stupid, knocking things over, wheezing and giggling.

Phantom Punch might be a departure of sorts for Lerche, but it's still infused with familiar tricks: the record features jazz rhythms and cool, sprightly melodies, Lerche's vaguely bizarre lyrics (his colloquial English isn't perfect, although his verses are considerably less clumsy than they were four years ago) and sweet, jubilant delivery-think pop-punk performed by Rufus Wainwright. And it's still oddly (but gratifyingly) difficult to discern exactly where Lerche fits into the contemporary indie landscape-his folkier pieces have earned him a handful of comparisons to Nick Drake, but his vocals are too tinged with barely contained glee (even when singing about conceptual self-hatred, like in "Tragic Mirror") to ever convincingly mimic Drake's dim sighs . And maybe that's the thing about Sondre Lerche: no matter what he's up to, he always sounds like he's having an embarrassingly good time.

Sure, he’s no Britney Spears or Hilary Duff, but as far as singer/songwriters go, Sondre Lerche has lived a less than ordinary life in just 22 years.

The noted Norwegian tunesmith wrote his first song at 14, signing with Virgin Records three years later. Before he finished high school, Lerche’s star was rising in his native country, where he’d played a slew of shows, issued a pair of well-received EPs and even wrote and recorded his first full-length album, Faces Down (released stateside on Astralwerks). The set would be released about a month after his final day of school, eventually earning Lerche critical acclaim in both Europe and the U.S.

While the last two years haven’t been filled with Duff-like fanfare or Britney-esque pandemonium, they’ve nonetheless found Lerche in some fairly absurd situations, he says. Perhaps his most fantastic moment came in the summer of 2001, when at the request of ’80s MTV sensation A-Ha—who, despite being a one-hit wonder with “Take On Me” in the U.S., is still beloved in its native Norway—he performed with the group before some 25,000 in an Oslo soccer stadium.

“It was so absurd because I can’t tell you how much time I spent idolizing their music and their appearance when I was only a kid,” Lerche says of the performance, during which he joined the group for his favorite A-Ha song (“Locust” from 1992’s Memorial Beach). “And obviously it’s really strange to be sharing a microphone with the singer, switching between the verse and the refrain and the backing vocals, and singing the lead.”

That said, Lerche’s sometimes old-timey, Beatles-inflected, Euro folk-pop probably owes more to The Beach Boys, Burt Bacharach and late Brazilian star Antonio Carlos Jobim than A-Ha. Apart from his magnetic voice, which draws comparisons to Nick Drake and Rufus Wainwright, Lerche is a smart, deeply ambitious songwriter sporting boyish good looks. (“Lerche is a pretty-boy with skill. Damn him,” wrote one critic.)

Lerche has earned respect by adding a slightly more adventurous twist to the traditional singer-songwriter shtick, infusing his record with touches of bossa nova and Bacharachian arrangements.

“I wanted to make the songs as rich and colorful as possible without being kitschy. I was really into a lot of the easy-listening songs and arrangements and some lounge music, and the perkiness of the use of instruments and the use of strings and all that,” he explains.

His second album, Two Way Monologue, arrives this March and finds him stretching his arrangements significantly. Another batch of 12 songs (10 sculpted with his band and two self-recorded), the disc, he says, marks the next step in his evolution as a songwriter. It includes “these small ideas which may sound less important for others, but for me in the songwriting process they’re huge, and they can make all the difference in the world to making it interesting and fun for me to do.

“With time, you get a distance, and naturally your next move is going to be some sort of reply to what you’ve done before, some kind of contrast. You wanna do more of that and less of that, and you wanna do this instead of that, which you did on the first record.

“So this one was basically about two things: It was about loosening up the structure of the songs, making the structure less obvious, letting go of the very strict and tiny structure of the songs on Faces Down and instead trying to create a whole story of the song based on different parts and trying to bridge all these parts into a natural flow, which was just something I did to challenge myself and to kind of create, stimulate some sort of new energy in a way.

“And the other thing I wanted to do was—because some of the songs at least were more complex in their structure—I didn’t want the arrangement to be as packed as on Faces Down, where it’s kind of almost 100 percent packed with harmonies, with sonic ideas and the production is very tight. On this one, I wanted to leave air left in the songs. I wanted them to breathe more, and I wanted them to be less packed with arrangement ideas.”

Ed Harcourt and Sondre Lerche stopped in Atlanta Monday night to wrap up their U.S. tour. Norwegian-born Lerche had already opened the night when I arrived. According to the doorman I only missed two songs so I quickly grabbed one of the remaining spots on the bar steps.

When I saw that Lerche was alone on stage I was disappointed. Faces Down, Lerche’s debut, made a huge impression on me with its dense, unique instrumentation; I assumed his songs would lose at least some of their effect when he played them alone. Nothing, it turned out, could be further from the truth. As I sat on the steps of the bar, his immense talent as a young songwriter and performer hit me hard.

During “Dead Passengers,” the catchy opener from Faces Down, I started to feel like I was watching the beginning of something wonderful. Though his age bleeds through now and then, his performance foreshadowed greatness to come.

The comfortable and confident Lerche engaged the crowd with his charming wit and lack of cynicism, asking us to sing along here and there. He was funny, but not sarcastic, condescending only to himself when he said “I’m going to play my stupid guitar.” He wasn’t self-deprecating but he seemed to understand the virtue in minimal banter between songs. He had a tendency to slap his own wrist when he felt like he had talked too long.

He flipped his disheveled hair through a Strokes-inspired version of “Sleep On Needles” as though begging for a barber and a pair of scissors. After the song, the loudest and fastest of the night, Lerche apologized; He claimed his evil twin brother Eddie Lerche had actually snuck out to play that one. “He is such a bastard,” Lerche said. Then he invited Harcourt to sit behind the piano and duet with him.

Lerche’s real life quirks are like his music, pleasant and cheery but not boring. He’s squeaky clean in both looks and language—he drank nothing but water on stage, and “bastard” was the dirtiest word he said all night.

On the other hand, Lerche’s travel-mate, Ed Harcourt, appeared to be relatively under the influence when he arrived on stage. By the end of the show, he’d informed the audience about the dirty underwear he had on and asked who was going to be having sex later.

Harcourt began his performance seated at the piano and played a beautiful, subdued version of “All of Your Days Will be Blessed.” Then he dedicated a quiet “Apple of my Eye” to two girls standing behind me. After a few songs he stood up and swaggered to his acoustic guitar.

It was surprising to see that Harcourt is left-handed and simply flips a right-handed guitar over. The strings remain upside down lending his guitar a thin, ringing tone when he strums it.

He used a two-mic setup switching between them for different tones. A tear-shaped one looked like something from the ’50s and made Harcourt sound like he was singing into a jar.

A moving version of “The Birds Will Sing for Us” cast Harcourt as a lovesick sweetheart and the audience seemed to respond to the soft voice and scruffy face projecting the song.

Harcourt returned Lerche’s invitation for a duet, as Lerche came out late during the main set and for the encore. They glided through “Metaphorically Yours” during the encore. As Harcourt opened with the line “baby just admit if both my wrists were slit you’d bandage them with style and grace,” Lerche’s harmonies filled it out perfectly. Harcourt ended the show with a couple of stomps on the piano and one final shin across the keys.

The CMJ Music Marathon is aptly named: four nights of racing from venue to venue to subway to venue to late-night sushi to venue, hoping to discover something special among the hundreds of artists performing throughout lower Manhattan. While the 24-member Polyphonic Spree with their horns, harp and choir robes were a joy to behold, it was on the quiet Thursday afternoon at the Museum of Television and Radio in Midtown where I was most impressed. That’s when I heard Sondre Lerche.

The garage rock of his neighboring Swedes (The Hives, the Hellacopters and the Flaming Sideburns) might be getting the press, but the exquisite melodies of this 20-year-old Norwegian are truly sublime. I spoke with him before his live set for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic with Nic Harcourt, ignorant of the methodically infectious music that was to follow in the small studio theater.

I had just scoured the Internet for anything that might help me interview the young singer-songwriter. Ten minutes yielded the following: His debut album, Faces Down, had already been certified gold in Norway. He quotes Burt Bacharach as a big influence. And he wrote his first song at age 14.

The impact of Bacharach and Costello quickly became apparent as his vocals playfully countered the clever chord progressions on his acoustic guitar. But Lerche has processed the ’60s pop aesthetic through a Beck-influenced lens, and the result is both adventurous and gaudily accessible. And while English is his second language, his command of it surpasses that of most Americans. His roughly-hewn lyrics offer another counterpoint to the melodies.

"It’s a collection of songs that I wrote when I was in school," he said of Faces Down, which was actually recorded at the end of 2000. "Kind of dark lyrics, but positive melodies and harmonies. And I think that’s a nice contrast."

Already he’s shared stages in Norway with labelmate Beth Orton and the undisputed kings of Nordic pop, a-ha. Faces Down hit #3 on Norway’s radio and sales charts. But on just his second day in the U.S., he seems to be handling the exposure well.

"You see a lot of people who are addicts to their own attention, to the fame," he said. "I’ve gotten quite a lot of attention for my music. You just need to keep focused on what you’re doing -- writing songs and performing them -- and appreciate that people are interested in what you’re doing and just leave it at that."

When Faces Down was released in the U.S. last fall, Lerche was already busy working on the follow-up, which he says will be more personal and a bit clearer lyrically.

"[Faces Down] is very well-organized structurally. On the new stuff, I’ve tried to break it up into more parts and have more variation within the song. Still of course the lyrics then have to be what keeps it together, because you have very different faces within the songs."

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.