The cover photograph of The Dark One, the first record since 2001 from Alsace Lorraine, seems designed to represent a symbolic break with the past from the band's previous (and only other) album, Through Small Windows. Dark's picture shows a window, but from the outside of a building in disrepair, ready for renovation. The group itself has gone through a significant overhaul over the past six years-- the hiatus caused by core member Paul Francke's recovery from health problems and entrance into an Episcopalian seminary-- and Dark features a new vocalist, Isol, the former singer for Argentinean electro-pop group Entre Rios. Isol is also an illustrator of books for what she calls "smart children", and her lyrics-- highbrow narratives presented through a thick veneer of youthful wonder-- merge with Francke's hazy, weightless backdrops and wry introspection to create an muted, effervescent collection of ivory-tower indie pop.
Dark's clear highlight is "Call for Papers", which favorably compares to predecessors who've also highlighted the "twee" in "tweed": the Magnetic Fields, Belle & Sebastian, and especially Camera Obscura, whose wonderfully glum academic rebuke from last year, "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken", feels like its companion piece. Taking a subject line of so many inter-collegiate e-mails seeking intellectual collaboration and re-imagining it as a plea for improved interpersonal communication might seem a recipe for disaster of the ponytail/elbow-patch variety, but "Paper"'s duet is heartfelt and, in its own way, sweet. Isol responds to Francke's romantic plea ("How many times have I cut your hair?") by lamenting her silence as a "writer's block," arising as it does from a too-quantitative approach to love: "weighing facts, cataloguing dreams."
"Papers" comes during the middle of Dark's first half, surrounded by likeminded songs that highlight the band's knack for wispy melodies, opaque literary pretensions, and, occasionally, bizarre yet still appropriate-sounding phrases. The chiming, xylophone-laden "As We Fight" mines the same Spectorian territory as the Pipettes, while featuring the lines "Homeskillet, does she calm your Dad?" and "There is a way that clinically sad students in love talk, my darling." "Dulce et Decorum" is a Cocteau Twins song masquerading as a Basil King motivational tract ("Vigilant bulrushes kneel before you, surround and guard you"), and "One Day, Far Off, If the World Forgot" imagines a future where "the world forgot all about rock" and "if in our teenage years, nothing changed." It's not a sad song either, just cautiously speculative, from the same emotional distance the rest of Dark employs to good effect.
Like good intellectuals, Francke and Isol know in which tradition they're situated: Saint Etienne's Ian Catt and the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie show up to remix "Papers" and "The Tall Grass", respectively. Unfortunately, Guthrie feels the need to create a stereotypically Cocteau-esque icy whirr, thereby sapping the original of its airy appeal, and Catt's version enriches "Paper"'s sonics, adds a zither and melodica, but not much else. This is fine, though; Catt's and Guthrie's underwhelming remixes only prove that Alsace Lorraine don't need tacked-on cameos to flesh out or draw attention to their record; their original work does well enough on their own.
