Feels so unnatural-- Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, too. The late qawwali legend has earned the admiration of singers as different as Jeff Buckley, Eddie Vedder, and Devendra Banhart. On 1989's The Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack, he also worked with Peter Gabriel, who ended up releasing six of Khan's albums on his own Real World label. With so much indie culture these past few years stuck in the 1980s, Gabe fave raves Vampire Weekend are simply the most collegiate of recent bands returning to Toto's "Africa" for inspiration. Khan's native Pakistan has been comparatively overlooked.
Victoria Bergsman's recorded output to date is almost quintessentially Swedish. With the Concretes, she introduced Diana Ross shimmy to Mazzy Star haze, staying tuneful enough to soundtrack TV commercials. Lending her shy detachment to Peter Bjorn and John's world-conquering "Young Folks", she participated in a moment likely to define Swedish pop for many casual listeners the way Ace of Base or ABBA used to serve as shorthand for the peace-loving nation's catchiest export. Bergsman's debut album as Taken by Trees, 2007's Open Field, uses the full expanse of PB&J-er Björn Yttling's production (plus a songwriting credit from Camera Obscura's Tracyanne Campbell) to evoke a gorgeously austere northern landscape, the kind of place where you appreciate the sun all the more because it shines so sparingly.
So it's tempting to be skeptical of Bergsman's trip to Pakistan to record a follow-up-- all the more so given an accompanying National Geographic mini-documentary's whiff of cultural condescension. Thankfully, East of Eden suits Taken by Trees the way a shift from folk-pop to terrifying avant-classical suited oft-mentioned German antecedent Nico. Bergsman's plaintive purr can't match Khan's multi-octave ululations, and unlike the late Buckley, she doesn't try. Instead, she and accompanist Andreas Söderström-- working with local musicians who've played alongside the maestro-- embrace the ecstatic peacefulness of this Sufi musical tradition's rhythms and instrumentation. Production from Studio's Dan Lissvik gives the nine-song, half-hour set an ascetic grace, sort of like secular devotional music. How very Scandinavian.
In truth, Taken by Trees' debut already had a similar religious quality, albeit owing more to the introspective folk of Nick Drake; excellent remixes by the Tough Alliance and Air France showed how much those songs could gain by leaving Europe. On East of Eden, sinuous woodwind and rippling hand percussion help give plainspoken love songs like "Day by Day" or "Watch the Waves" an eternal resonance, which Bergsman's understated poise only deepens. Söderström's dusty classical guitar should please Studio devotees on haunting opener "To Lose Someone", while from out of the swaying call and response of "Greyest Love of All" rises a perfect prayer for our time of endless Web 2.0 connectivity and ever-shortening attention spans: "I hope you'll find some peace of mind."
Noah Lennox, aka Animal Collective's Panda Bear, is no stranger to prayerfulness, field recordings, or non-rock influences; that he and Bergsman would develop a mutual affinity is only fitting. After the fashion of Studio, TTA, Air France, and some of Gothenburg, Sweden's other musicians, who like to retitle and reimagine the songs they interpret, Taken by Trees transforms Merriweather Post Pavilion highlight "My Girls" into intimate, harmonium-humming "My Boys". It's a little paradoxical, recording an ode to simple domesticity in a region where religious fundamentalism led men to consider the unmarried Bergsman "everyone's property," but as with any great hymn, this spirited meditation on indie-style puritanism should have the power to move even non-believers. Lennox, in turn, adds his incantatory vocals to the nylon-stringed regret of "Anna", where having "way too much tonight" can mean alcohol, fighting, or both.
If you go straight long enough, somebody once said, you'll end up where you were. East of Eden, in that sense, isn't so far from Studio's West Coast: a masterful, hypnotic album that draws on a world of influences but is ultimately limited by none. So the most distracting misstep is "Wapas Karna", essentially a field recording fronted by a qawwali singer rather than Bergsman herself, while two other less immediate tracks are compelling mostly for their impulse toward cultural merger: the sparsely adorned, Swedish-language melancholy of "Tidens Gång", which melts into ambient chirps in under two minutes, or the closing drone of "Bekännelse", apparently a setting of a poem by (German) writer Herman Hesse that reflects some of Bergsman's liberal guilt. "If you know what you want to create and are determined, you can do it wherever you are," Bergsman recently told London's The Independent. "I'd rather live in sunny California." This must be the place.
