Never mind that its summer. A soft snow’s a gonna fall in America, now that The Perishers have arrived, bringing their simple, sleepy brood rock to the masses. Fans of Coldplay, Keane and Snow Patrol rejoice! If you like watching icicles melt, this is the band for you.
Hailing from Umea, Sweden, where winter is 9 months long and constant darkness is normal, the Swedish sextet has drawn on their frigid environment to create a frostily pretty, uneven album of hope and despair. Though the arrangements are lush and gorge, and the piano driven melodies impressive, there is something too mellow about this record. Fixated on brood rock’s usual themes: love, loss, separation, The Perishers skate on the surface of misery, rather than delve under the ice.
The lyrics are often banal, vague trips down the slippery slope of sentimentality. Songwriter Ola Kluft said: “I can hide behind the English words in a way that I can’t hide behind Swedish words.” Makes you wish he sang in Swedish. It does not help matters that Kluft sounds like Jakob Dylan. I want to give him a hot toddy and tell him to please speak up.
Let There be Morning would have benefited from a few more months in the studio, but there are glimmers of the band that could be. “Sway” is a gorgeous song that reaches celestial heights of loveliness and heartache with angelic pianos and lyrics like “I’ve always been a dreamer, I hide my head among the clouds/ now that I’m coming down won’t you be my solid ground.” “Trouble Sleeping” is so hooky and radio ready, and “Pills” is a sweetly dark duet between Kluft and former singing teacher, Sarah Isakson. Then there’s “Weekends”, a fantastic, honest work-week anthem.
There is poetry in The Perishers, but to find it, you have to travel through some indistinct fields of white. Here’s hoping their next album is an avalanche. |