Emil Svanangen is a cuddly compulsive songwriter from Sweden whose heart pumps pure, high-grade twee. His songs are tentative, sweet, and irrepressible all at once, and they tend to gather energy as they go, bubbling over like an endearing record nerd's barely suppressed enthusiasm for his pet band. Then, at the end, they shoot skyward, spilling trumpets, oboes, flutes, and "na-na-nas" all over the place-- it can sometimes seem like Svanangen was engineered in a lab by movie execs to soundtrack indie films about quirky young love. His 2007 Sub Pop debut, Loney, Noir, was charming, slight, and egregiously misnamed: Loney Dear is about as "noir" as a squirming puppy.
On his new one, Dear John, however, he has tapped a surprising a vein of melancholy, and it suits him. The beaming, California-sunset optimism of his previous record, Loney, Noir, grew wearying, even over a short 10 songs: You can only hear someone skip through a field of gillyflowers so many times before you start groping for your hip flask. Here Svanangen struggles poignantly with alien emotions like ambivalence and disappointment. "I used to make you songs so easily/ But things have turned so different from now," he laments on "I Was Only Going Out". It seems he went and got himself tangled up with an actual, flesh-and-blood woman, as opposed to an ideal sung to in a pop song. "I bought a ticket to Hell when I met up with you," he sings on "Airport Surroundings", and his vindictiveness is jarring.
The music, too, has become considerably darker. Svanangen still layers obsessively (he can't seem to go eight bars without cueing up another synthesizer preset), but on Dear John he avoids stacking all these sounds into unwieldy piles. On "Airport Surroundings" and "Under a Silent Sea", two of his most sophisticated productions to date, sounds pop up briefly and then disappear into the fabric, creating a subtle, shifting environment. "Under a Silent Sea" begins with simple acoustic finger-picking and a mournful haze of strings before a glittering trance synth hits and the track mutates into a majestically sad piece of Euro-house. If you walked into the room in between verses, you might think you had stumbled upon some brilliant outtake from 808s and Heartbreaks. Instead, it's Svanangen's record in miniature: It preserves what was fleetingly great about Loney, Noir while proving that Svanangen has more tricks in his bag than most people thought possible.
