Promise and the Monster is a children's book about a pony named Promise and a monster called, well, presumably, Monster. Promise and the Monster is also the adopted name of Swedish singer/multi-instrumentalist (guitar, cello, flute, organ, glockenspiel) Billie Lindahl, who, at 19, isn't that far-removed from picture-book reading herself. As if traced from some market-tested "indie girl" template, Lindahl has Feistian dark bangs and a coltish, eye-skirting demeanor, and sings in a high, breathy, elfin chirp in the neighborhood-- though with nowhere near the fence-building potential-- of Joanna Newsom. That sounds unbearably precious, but it isn't. Lindahl's songs are as indebted to pre-adolescence as her moniker, but they don't document devotion to ponies or, I dunno, Disney's mind-bogglingly successful High School Musical, but anxiety over skin, bodies, adult sexuality.
"I think I'd rather be made out of porcelain. Because I hate the body as a physical object," Lindahl has said, sounding like that girl at the party with her nose defensively buried in a battered copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther, wishing she had the courage to speak to someone (so stated, hopefully, with a smidgeon of self-mockery). But her first LP, Transparent Knives, pursues this theme relentlessly with a succession of frigid motifs: shivering lips, frozen sheets of skin, steel veins channeling cold, roots recoiling into winter soil. Lindahl's vocals perch high in the songs' chilly mixes like carrion birds dispassionately surveying snow-sheathed hills for fresh kill. At the same time, she articulates repulsion's inevitable corollary-- attraction. "When I watch you sing/ Along with that song/ I love the way you move," she coos contradictorily in "Night Out", more fire than ice.
Lindahl shares a label (and has toured) with countryman José González, and fingerpicked figures and classical guitar cadences mark Transparent Knives' surfaces. The common carp about González-- that all the songs sound the same, even the covers-- might also implicate Promise and the Monster. "Antarktis", "Light Reflecting Papers" and "Trials" are powered by low steady currents rather than fuse-blowing surges, their arabesque guitar figures shapeshifting languorously via subtle tempo and tone permutations. This makes for ethereal and mesmerizing, but not always memorable, music. Lindahl's capable of dynamic arrangements, though. "Night Out"'s chorus explodes like a thicket of fireflies against the midnight sky, its double-tracked vocals and string section marking the album's warmest, and Euro-poppiest, moment. While "Sheets'" organ vamps aren't exactly electrifying, they shade the track with spooky gothic menace. And her version of Carter Family staple "Single Girl, Married Girl", trades mountain-folk fatalism for percolating plucked strings and a sprightly singsong.
Sweden's thick on the ground with chanteuse-troubadour types these days, and the more obviously charismatic El Perro del Mars and Jens Lekmans of the scene could easily overshadow Promise and the Monster's dark, diffident presence. Which would be a pity. Transparent Knives is a tuneful, complex-- and surprisingly mature-- debut from a kid who's likely to have even more to say as she accumulates life experience.
