Farao, aka Norwegian multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter Kari Jahnsen, could have taken a more predictable road on her debut album. She has the breathy, clear, slightly husky soprano voice that's come to characterize "indie" (the genre, not the ethos). She has the right image. She has the instrumental chops. She could have created songs that are more easily consumable than those on Till It's All Forgotten, songs that fit into TV and film montage or title sequences. She could have taken the easy road. We should all be thankful she didn't.
Like her countrywoman Jenny Hval, Jahnsen's work defies categorization and commodification at every turn. It's not in the least bit easy to create music that sounds truly like you and nobody else, but Jahnsen manages to do so. The instrumentation on Till It's All Forgotten is rich—electronics, horns, synth strings, piano, a standard guitar-based rock band, vocal manipulation—and though all that layering and texture could feel heavy and cluttered, it rarely does. Jahnsen has an ear for structure, always pulling when the song could have pushed, turning right when it could have turned left, never relying on ABABC to get her through. Opener and title track "TIAF" is a perfect example—it's a lush, beautiful song with stacked vocals and a cascading synth that would drift into quirky Starbucks background fare if not for the stuttering, off-time percussion that jars the song out of complacency.
The lyrical themes on Till It's All Forgotten always circle back to the gaps in human communication and the desire that grows in those damp, mossy spaces left open between us because we're too scared of our own shadows to look into them. It's an album about slippage, discomfort, unease. "Bodies", which was released as a single with an unsettling and intimate video depicting the solitary and intense relationship between two teenage girls as they explore a landscape abandoned by adults, is a dense song even without the visuals, with its military-percussive lope and clot of horn punctuation. Jahnsen has said the song is about "surrendering to bad decisions and consciously going down the wrong path", something all of us can relate to but few of us would brag about.
It's this commitment to quotidian territory that makes Till It's All Forgotten so engaging. The delicate "Hunter" could read as a love song but is instead about the process of dehumanizing another. The haunting "Feel" could be simply about sexuality but is instead about the desire for deep connection with someone else. The sprawling "Warriors" refuses to lapse into epic inspirational platitude; it is about the exhaustion of being perpetually ready to fight. Jahnsen takes well-covered general themes and distills something small and strange out of each; her instrumentation is huge and complicated while her lyrics remain resolutely human-scale.
Jahnsen played and arranged many of the instruments on the album herself, and the album is like an expansive and bizarre terrarium in which Jahnsen has carefully called for the placement of each element. She places tinny synth microtones next to big wooden piano notes on "Fragments", a song about human complications, and she loops her vocals around these basic tones, she demonstrates how naturally complications arise from a simple setup. Arrangements this teeming could be claustrophobic, but Jahnsen exerts firm control over her rich and highly detailed world. It's her mastery and attention that is ultimately what, I suspect, makes her work so consistently complex and worthwhile.
