More than two years passed between Swedish duo Korallreven's first single, the glittering, acoustically-tinged "Loved-Up", and their full-fledged debut LP, An Album by Korallreven. In internet years, that's practically a decade, but then, Korallreven and their fellow countrymen work at a pace that exists outside normal measurements of time (the exception being jj, who seemingly churn out slices of heavy-lidded pop at will). It took Korallreven close to a year to follow "Loved-Up" with last year's "The Truest Faith"; the arrival of An Album by Korallreven itself was promised for later in 2010. Considering bedroom dreamers have been waiting four years (and counting) for a follow-up to Gothenburg duo the Tough Alliance's A New Chance, though, maybe we're lucky An Album by Korallreven exists at all.
They do have things in common with the Tough Alliance beyond citizenship and a leisurely working pace: Both acts are duos, both embrace a color palette of popular music so widespread it's difficult to describe what they make with a catch-all descriptor, and both ultimately draw deep from indie pop's dewy-eyed tradition (Korallreven especially-- one half of the band's Daniel Tjäder, who spends time leafing through the Sarah and Labrador catalogues as a member of the Radio Dept.) For all their sentiments, the Tough Alliance are also arch and fairly political; Korallreven, on the other hand, are more concerned with surface beauty, applying layers of gauze that add immense, weightless density to their own pop delicacies.
In a sense, it's music that you don't necessarily have to think about, which is fine, of course-- even the most bookish of Sincerely Yours/Service/Acéphale completists need something to lose themselves in now and again. The album's shortest cut, "A Surf on Endorphins", is a redux of "The Truest Faith"'s rolling theme, awash in coyote howls and static distance. As its title suggests, the song's meant to provoke emotion, albeit far from the energized sort. During the bleeping, hypnotic centerpiece "Keep Your Eyes Shut", the phrase, "A dream within a dream," is repeated like a mantra.
Indie pop's history dictates that many of its practitioners are, first and foremost, ardent fans of the music that's influenced the music they make; accordingly, Tjäder and cohort Marcus Joons come across less as artists as they do expert curators. They move from the 808s of "As Young as Yesterday" (a signifier reminiscent of once-label mates Salem, whom Korallreven have featured in mixes frequently) to the space-disco-via-pastoral-ambient beauty of nine-minute album closer "Comin' Down" with the ease of a single brushstroke. The pair's series of mixes (the most recent being A Dream Within a Dream) flow with expert sequencing that betrays the amateur nature of mix culture circa 2011.
It's no surprise, then, that An Album by Korallreven works best as an album-length experience, its structure suggesting a sort of trip-- spiritual or chemical or otherwise. It's an album of quiet excellence, one that aims to soundtrack your most idle thoughts while romantically demanding your attention. That said, it doesn't really matter how An Album by Korallreven resonates within our world, when Tjäder and Joons are so intent in creating their own.
