Lust for Youth feels neither lustful nor particularly youthful: The work of one Swedish guy holding down two or three notes on a Casio and declaiming tonelessly, like he's straining to make himself heard over a supermarket PA system, it feels about as sensual as a tomb. If it evokes any lust at all, it's the vampiric sort, as if Gary Oldman, in all his blade-licking, scenery-chewing, Frau Helga-wig sporting Bram Stoker's Dracula glory, had composed a minimal wave album for his beloved instead of crossing oceans of time. Its stylistic antecedents are pretty clear-- New Order, the Normal, and the earliest and most inchoate 1970s synth-pop experiments. But it feels very much like a keyhole peek at one man's private torment.
His name is Hannes Norrvide, and Growing Seeds has the obsessive feel of something banged out in one demented trance. The sound is corroded and thin, and some of the songs are so defaced by fuzz that they're barely legible. If you were scanning a car radio and landed on a station that sounded like "We Planted A Seed", you would grit your teeth and wait it out, seeing if the signal improved being plowing forward. It sounds uninviting on paper, but there's frustrating murk and there's haunting murk, and Growing Seeds is the second kind.
The limited palette works to the album's advantage. Listening to it, you feel pushed beneath the surface of something: It helps that Norrvide's fingers somehow always land on an instantly memorable four-note synth riff. The carpal-tunnel drive of "Champagne", in which two rudimentary earworms bounce off each other for four minutes, hits the same nagging sweet spot as the most hypnotically driving 8-bit music. The same goes for "Cover Their Faces", which manages to summon "Plainsong" grandeur with a tiny octave riff and tinny drum fill. The more time you spend in this flattened landscape, the more individual peaks rise up from it. Songs like "Neon Lights Appear" and "It's You" are synth bangers on a cellular level.
Over this digital blizzard, Norrvide drifts like the rumor of a lead singer. He's subdued, but it's the subdued of an emotional meltdown faintly overheard through three or four apartment walls. Behind the otherwise wordless blank space of "We Got Lust", you can faintly make out a woman's screams and sobs, an upsetting and affecting addition. Picking through the album to discern moments like this, like when Norrvide repeatedly gasps "Now...dream of you..." ("Modern Life"), makes them feel more precious for being hard-won. Whether or not this chilly despair is intentional or just a byproduct of the methods used to make it isn't clear; Norrvide told FACT Magazine that Growing Seeds is "about getting out of a depressive period and meeting new love." Which is a little mind-bending given the album's tone. But it's the atmosphere that keeps pulling me back to it, hoping to extract another clue this time around.
