Sambassadeur's Anna Persson sings softly and fluidly, favoring held notes that sound like they might dissipate into the music around her. Her voice often seems more typical of shoegaze or introverted folk than 1980s-cribbing pop, but she strikes the right note of dreaminess and cool drama in Sambassadeur's songs. The band gently buttresses her vocals with guitar and synth rhythms that percolate playfully, creating a wistful contrast with her sustained vocals. This combination of textures-- like tweed under silk-- lent past singles like "Between the Lines" and "Kate", from the band's 2005 home-recorded self-titled debut and their Coastal Affairs EP respectively, their melancholy charm and distinctive personality among their Swedish contemporaries.
The big news on the band's follow-up LP, Migration, is that Sambassadeur have changed their sound considerably. If they flirted with lo-fi indie pop in the past, these new songs sound triumphantly hi-fi circa 1986, fitting lush, rainy-day pop melodies with the ornate flourishes of Book of Love-- singles "Final Say" and "Subtle Changes" explode out of their verse-chorus-verse, three-minute restrictions. Nine tracks clocking in at just over half an hour, Migration manages to sound simultaneously sprawling and succinct. "The falling of stars will come back in fashion again," Persson sings on "Subtle Changes", and it sounds less like nostalgia than a musical mission statement. The song's galloping pace pushes Persson's vocals into her upper range, suggesting hopefulness in the face of so much hurt and regret. On opener "The Park", she pleads with a friend or lover to ignore their big problems for the moment and just enjoy a park bench together, "making comments on the people passing by," and the chipper synths and the keyboards set to woodwind-- familiar enough to make you think you recognize it-- give her plea a sense of desperation.
Even as these new bells and whistles make the songs more elaborate and immediate, in actuality Sambassadeur sound more or less the same. The style is still subdued baroque, the overriding mood still dreamy and downcast, their primary subject still romantic disillusionment. It's fitting that their cover of Dennis Wilson's "Lady (Fallin' in Love)" comes across as ruminative and rueful instead of celebratory. Singing "I'm in love in love in love with my baby," Persson doesn't sound like she's shouting it from the rooftops, but resigning herself to the inevitable heartache ahead. For her, love is bad, bad news. Immediately following "Fallin' in Love", the title track sounds even more like a cover, sporting a 60s-style hook that makes a sad pun of the marital declaration "I do." This pair of songs, adorned mostly with guitar and drums, recall the Sambassadeur of previous releases, but with a stronger interpretive bent and a grimmer sense of humor.
So it's a little disappointing when Daniel Permbo takes over vocals for "Someday We're Through". Instead of forming a he-said, she-said dialogue with Persson, the change is simply abrupt, isolating the song from the album. He does a passable job with the slightly more bitter song, but it only reminds you how much more commanding Persson is. Between that song and the instrumental closer "Calvi", Migration ends on a sleepy note, where once it had been subtle and insinuating. Even the relatively upbeat "Something to Keep", sandwiched between the two, can't rouse the album's final third out of this dreary daze.
