Before his music career came together, you might have found Finnish electronic musician Jaakko Eino Kalevi—a dreamy sprite with chest-length strawberry blonde hair and a gaze like a pair of moonbeams—spending his days driving a tram around his adopted hometown of Helsinki. Knowledge of his day job might be a key to understanding the drifting spaciousness and fluid sense of his music. But really, it's hard to shake the impression Kalevi is one of those figures—like, say, Sébastien Tellier—who appears born into his role: a dashing synth-pop troubadour of Platonic perfection.
By his own account, Kalevi grew up on the progressive metal of Dream Theater and cut his teeth making hip-hop beats before refining his current style: a pastel-shaded blend of saxophone-stoked soft rock, electronic pop, and disco that feels at least as Gallic as it does Scandinavian, romantic of heart and melancholic in disposition. The prevailing mood of his music—louche, elegant, a little hazy around the edges—belies a forensic attention to detail that Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel of Air, or, before that, finicky studiohounds like Steely Dan brought to the recording process. It's unclear if Jaakko Eino Kalevi was made at huge expense, or scraped together for loose change, but with a mix job by Nicolas Vernhes everything feels just so, drums punchy and mechanistic, guitars luxuriant in their heady sustain.
The eponymous title prepares you, rightly, for a degree of self-absorption. "Minun nimeni on Jaakko Eino Kalevi" he sings, over and over on the opening "JEK", a theme song of sorts that remains heavy-lidded until around the two minute mark, when a glorious synth sequence fires up, shadowed by some exquisitely sad saxophone. Elsewhere, Kalevi sings in English, often in duet with co-vocalist Suad Khalifa. On "Deeper Shadows", their dolorous vocal and one-fingered synth motifs recall the endearing naifishness of early '80s continental pop groups such as Elli et Jacno, while the rippling synths and swooning vocals of "Double Talk" have a burnished beauty that reminds me of another Vernhes production, Wild Nothing's Nocturne. The sound is so pristine that you occasionally get the feeling the material comes to rest on it, like the twinkling lounge funk of "Room". Still, Kalevi never resorts to irony, and he's comfortable in his own rarefied tastes.
Jaakko Eino Kalevi strikes a tone of millennial ennui; "Don't Ask Me Why" is suffused with the sort of youthful world-weariness that could easily find a home on some future Sofia Coppola soundtrack. Elsewhere, though, we get glimpses of a steelier spirit. "Break the self/ And build it again" chants Kalevi on "Mind Like Muscle", a hymn to self-improvement that revolves endlessly before finally dissolving into vaporous guitar. The loping Peter Gabriel pop of "Say" hides a character assassination amidst its silky folds: "They say that you rot and shatter/ They say that you leak dark matter," he sings, as jabbing sax notes twist from smile to snarl. Then comes the loaded question, discharged like a pistol: "Is it true that you once had a heart?"
Some have sought to draw comparison between Kalevi and Ariel Pink, which feels like a red herring. Ariel Rosenberg appears compelled by an urgent need to deconstruct and reconstruct pop history and explode notions of good taste. Little of that tension is to be found here, and indeed some listeners might miss it. Not a huge problem, though. Kalevi speaks softly but moves boldly, and Jaakko Eino Kalevi feels like a refinement of his own unique spirit.
