Last year, John Maus' We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves LP included a song by a little-known, Swedish-born synth-pop artist named Molly Nilsson. "Hey Moon" was a lovely, downtempo duet, offsetting the claustrophobic intensity of Maus' originals with a moment of understatement and calm. What many of us didn't realize was that, aside from Maus' vocals, it was an almost note-perfect rendition of a track from These Things Take Time, a CD-R Nilsson self-released in 2008. Since then the interview-shy, Berlin-based songwriter has written and home-recorded no fewer than three LPs, and put all of them out on her own Dark Skies Association imprint. Like Maus', her songs are built primarily from vocals and vintage electronics, with a comforting patina of false age.
History, her fourth full-length, is an 11-track collection of power ballads and off-kilter dance-pop, carried by the commanding, almost Nico-like ominousness of her voice. Synthetic, darkly romantic, and full of grandiose swells, her songs are likely to sound self-consciously 1980s without reminding you of any artist in particular. They also feel slightly awkward, as though she were struggling to reproduce the ecstatic pop vision inside her head using the antiquated tools at her disposal. Should there be any doubt that Nilsson's notion of History is partly about the relationship between humans and technology, anthemic opener "In Real Life" cuts straight to the chase with an existential meditation on the unreality of life in the internet age: "Online I never feel alone. I never feel alive." "Hotel Home", another anthemic standout, sees Nilsson comparing herself to a "satellite," and warning us that she's "never at home, so call on Skype."
There is a sort of wide-eyed innocence to statements like these, a guilelessness that feels equivalent to the cheesy synth presets she unleashes from the opening note. Susan Sontag once defined camp as "art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.'" Album standout "I Hope You Die" demonstrates the over-the-topness of Nilsson's aesthetic most forcefully, combining a bouncy dance beat, swirling synths, and the sort of tragic romanticism that would make Morrissey proud: "I hope you die, by my side, the two of us at the exact same time." The key here is that Nilsson's music feels celebratory even at its darkest moments, chock full of auto-harmonies and dramatic tempo changes and eager remind us that "too much" can be very satisfying sometimes.
For the most part, History unfolds with the theatrical pacing of a rock opera, alternating between large-sounding anthems and more stripped-down, slow-paced asides, usually with Nilsson singing over elementary piano melodies. Even with these variations, everything does start to feel a little bit the same, but you probably won't mind if you're easily enchanted by the album's overall gloss of elegiac, glam-rock decadence, enhanced by Nilsson's deadpan delivery, and lyrics that revolve around doomed love, lost worlds (see: "The City of Atlantis"), and "chances... blown" ("Hotel Home"). Even if you're not, there's still something charming about the sound of a person trying to make "big" music with wonky drum machines and limited keyboard technique. When she doesn't quite pull it off, there's a beauty to the sound of a person trying, failing, and letting us bear witness to the whole thing. When she does, we're smitten.
