Stina's previous effort, This Is Stina Nordenstam, was a lush, vibrant record, with the big-name production/engineering duo of Tchad Black and Mitchell Froom fussing and polishing behind the glass. It even featured a few appearances from Suede's Brett Anderson, no stranger to glamor and bombast. Needless to say, it was a departure from the pensive, reclusive noises Stina was best known for, and if this snippet from her online bio (written in prose, but laid out on the screen as a free verse poem) is any indication, it wasn't a welcome departure:
"For so long Stina Nordenstam appeared to be running away. Like escape itself became the destination. Her music was homeless because that's what she wanted it to be. Albums were recorded in Los Angeles; musicians were flown in from all over the world, silly amounts were spent on photo sessions in New York. Until the only constant was her voice."
For The World Is Saved, Stina returned home, writing and recording the record in Stockholm, employing Swedish musicians-- including jazz trumpeter Goran Kajfes and Ken Vandermark collaborator Johan Berthling-- and even setting up her own record label (A Walk in the Park) to issue the record. (A slightly larger recording concern, V2 Records, is co-releasing this album with Stina's modest conglomerate.) As you might imagine, the result of this cautious and introspective effort is a cautious and introspective record. Complex instrumental arrangements abound, and there are plenty of moments where wry humor and sobering truths flourish, but space and silence dominate.
As her biography attests, Stina's voice remains a constant throughout her work, whether she's abetted by hyper-processed bells and attenuated whistles or alone with a guitar and studio ambiance. For example, take these lyrics from the first song off the album, "Get on With Your Life": "They put a needle once in my spine/ It took them so long to find it/ I can't get this porn film out of my head/ Let's get on with it."
Stina seemingly enjambs the first two lines when she sings them but pauses midway through the second line, after "it took them". Nearly a full measure goes by before she finishes the line. She turns this trick again in the second verse, stopping on the word "love" and then, after a few beats, finishing the thought-- "dies every second". It's a small detail, but it undoubtedly unsettles the listener. Beyond the way she handles the words, there's the way she sings them, voicing them in a bleached cracking mewl-- at once distraught and disinterested. She doesn't hold notes, there's no melisma or scale exercises, no multi-octave pyrotechnics. She sings the way a 10-year-old girl would sing-- if the 10-year-old had a sore throat and was afraid to annoy her parents.
To folks unfamiliar with Stina's work, this seemingly juvenile style of singing could be off-putting. However, an interesting thing happens halfway through this song, around the end of the second verse. When the orchestra-- to this point reticent and timid-- in the background of the chorus decides to gingerly enter the fray with pensive tremulous notes, Stina's recessed wisp of a voice is imbued with a fragile resonance. There are examples of this throughout this album, and her other records as well, and it's what sets her apart from other singers-- she manages to convey a range of nuanced emotions by foregoing superficial emoting, which is no easy feat.
In many ways, it's better that she avoids any demonstrative flourishes. The second song on the album, "Winter Killing", an incisive portrait of a love triangle-- the narrator is distancing herself from her lover (and her lover's wife)-- wouldn't be nearly as effecting in the throat of a different singer. At first, it seems as though the narrator's departure is a selfishly selfless gesture: I was stopped in customs/ Quite proud of the knack/ I have of knowing/ When it's over."
The narrator takes pride in the distance she's created, insisting "You're safer with me here/ And you there". And then, near the end of the song-- against a sparser version of the song's syncopated backdrop-- this bravado is revealed to be a faltering facade: "You'd made a lover out of me/ And spring was coming." Instead of her moving away for his sake, she's doing it to keep herself from feeling anything: "I'm safer with me here/ And you there". Stina's voice presents this confession in a calm matter-of-fact fashion that belies its devastating impact.
The World Is Saved is filled with these sardonic moments. Most of them are a result of Stina's lyrics juxtaposed not only with her voice but atypical musical settings as well. You find yourself sitting on a gorgeously mournful trumpet refrain? Make it into a song about writing snarky postcards to your ex-lover ("From Grand Cayman With Love")! You want to recast Gregor Samsa as a butterfly instead of a cockroach ("Butterfly")? Do it with this jaunty toe-tapping junk-driven jalopy! As for the title track, why not use plucked strings, craggy violin bowing, and rumbling xylophones to gleefully pervert the title's sentiment?
From the sound of this record, salvation came at a high price. The stories Stina tells, and the means she uses to tell them, paint extraordinary portraits born of hard lessons and harder struggles. If-- as her bio claims-- "this is some of the most hopeful music" Stina Nordenstam has ever recorded, it's a sinewy, ragged hope. Even after all that she's been through, there is something to look forward to. "Yet I hold nothing/ In my arms but my arms". For better or worse, and with all due apologies to her previous work, this is Stina Nordenstam.
