You wouldn't need to pay attention to the lyrics on Lacrosse's sophomore album to understand that every track is about love. Not just any love, mind you-- a big, big love; the sort of gigantic feeling that threatens to distract you from everything else in your life. The music is enormous and often overwhelming, with every hook and gesture blown out to absurd extremes of joy, desire, and anxiety, emulating the heightened emotional reality of romantic comedies and teen soaps. Every moment of the album sounds incredibly exaggerated, but at their best, Lacrosse replicate the intense drama of ordinary love with uncanny accuracy.
There are many ways to sound huge on record, so let's clarify: Lacrosse's approach to pop music falls at the intersection of the Arcade Fire's propulsive life-or-death anthems and Alphabeat's hyper-romantic glee, resulting in an odd but immensely appealing hybrid sound that is perhaps best described as stadium twee. The lyrical concerns and general aesthetic of the band is essentially the same as what you may expect from, say, any band on the Darla label, but the music is far more muscular and ambitious, trading in the demure self-deprecation of homegrown indie for the forthright emoting of full-blown chart pop.
Every track on Bandages for the Heart is a male/female duet, with singers Nina Wähä and Kristian Dahl mostly singing in unison to add punch to their otherwise thin voices. The immediate effect of their overlapping voices is to exacerbate the urgency of the music, but in the context of their lyrics, the technique mostly serves to highlight the fact that every song is about the communication between two people. Wähä and Dahl can be quite thrilling when they sing together, but they are even better when they split into constrasting parallel parts that offer differing perspectives on the same theme. This approach is especially effective in "I See a Brightness", an uplifting rocker about one half of a couple attempting to bring the other around to a more optimistic point of view.
Though many other bands can write peppy, catchy songs with anthemic choruses, Lacrosse are exceptionally gifted in dramaticizing the nuances of human relationships, and this anchors their bombast to relatable experiences rather than vague, fluffy sentiment. The characters on the record may be in different states of romantic angst, but each comes off as a real person in a specific situation, and the lyrics skillfully tip prosaic expressions of excitement, lust, and anxiety into witty asides. The lyrics are even better when they attain a level of lucidity nearly at odds with the hysterical emotion suggested by the music, as in the ebullient "Come Back Song #1", or the freakishly giddy "It's Always Sunday Around Here".
Lacrosse's aggressively perky tunes about love are exceedingly well-executed, but they tend to only be endearing if you are in the right state of mind. At the wrong moments, even the most glorious and life-affirming songs on Bandages for the Heart can be overbearing and flat-out aggravating, particularly if the very last thing you want to think about are the romantic entanglements of relentlessly grinning Swedes. Of course, only the blandest music can serve all purposes. When heard in moderation, or better yet, when in perfect allignment with its sentiment, these are some of the boldest, most evocative pop tunes you are likely to hear this year.
