Tomas Barfod churned out more new material over the first three months of 2014 than most artists produce in a full year: with a solo EP, a handful of one-off singles, and an album with his band WhoMadeWho all released before the end of March, nobody would’ve looked sideways if he spent the rest of the year on vacation. But just three months after the release of the Pulsing EP, Barfod is back with a proper follow-up to his 2012 debut Salton Sea, and the title of his new record, Love Me, seems like a bit of a laugh on Barfod’s part. Even if you feel the least bit lukewarm about his music, he’ll wear you down with an hour of mild, mid-tempo body music until you grant him your grudging admiration.
Pulsing was a stopgap effort where Barfod began to straddle vocal electro-pop and abstract, instrumental fare in equal measure; with Love Me, he devotes an unprecedented amount of his energy to the former realm, realizing his vision with the help of a small group of close collaborators. He's steadily built a diverse personal universe of songwriting partners, guest vocalists, and associates who feature on Love Me: Barfod’s WhoMadeWho bandmate Jeppe Kjellberg, fellow countryman Brian Batz (who records slow, strange dream pop as Sleep Party People), Night Beds' Winston Yellen, New Orleans rapper/singer Pell. The strongest of these collaborations give the album an eclectic, nicely varied feel, especially Yellen's turn on "Sell You", which is rendered lonely and distant by way of vocal processing.
Barfod’s prinicipal collaborator is Swedish vocalist Nina K, who appeared on Salton Sea highlight “November Skies” and Pulsing’s title track, the latter of which also appears on Love Me. Nina is featured on four of the album’s eleven tracks, all of which can be counted among its finest moments; their chemistry remains palpable, as they’ve learned to strike just the right balance between Barfod’s beat-heavy, rhythmically forward production and the lightness of Nina’s vocals. The moody, string-swooning “Aftermath” sets a new high water mark for their partnership; yearning and raw, it comes off as their own downcast version of Robyn and Kleerup’s masterful “With Every Heartbeat”, still a standard-bearer for heartbroken electro-pop balladry.
The success of the non-Nina K collaborations scattered throughout the remainder of Love Me depend on the vocalist: “Bell House” thrives thanks to a alien performance from pop-folk nomad and Here We Go Magic frontman Luke Temple, while back-half features by Kjellberg and Pell sink unmemorably into the morass. One downside to Barfod’s chosen compositional style—tempos that rarely stray from middle-ground territory, standard-issue electronic tones, rhythms that split the difference between organic and machine-based—is that the onus to shape his songs is largely on his collaborators, so when he's not working with Nina K, his hit rate’s more scattershot as a result. Love Me ultimately confirms what we already knew about Barfod’s solo work: he plays well with others, but a greater overall consistency might garner him the love he’s seeking.
