Of all the loveable things about Jens Lekman, my favorite is how he tosses banana peels on the paths of conventional taste. Seldom does such wonderful music sound so comically awful when you try to describe it to someone. "Man, he's amazing, like Neil Sedaka with a bit of a head cold singing over the Love Boat theme song." By the time you get that far, dude is already backing away slowly. A Swedish indie-pop dramatist who introduces sarcastic modernity to the most gloriously moribund styles of the 20th century-- from orientalist world music to suburban exotica-- Lekman guides an enthusiastic tour through the dustiest yard-sale record collections, conjuring obscure shades of Henry Mancini, Harry Belafonte, and Bobby McFerrin. Smooth saxes and indigenous flutes jostle against some of the most quotable one-liners this side of Das Racist. Listening to him gives me strange urges, like downloading the latter-day Beach Boys discography.
With such an approach, it would be easy to slip into actual decadence or mere parody. Lekman, a slippery character, avoids both because of his rich, alloyed personality, which can sop up any amount of pink champagne. He whisks us out of the authenticity-obsessed house that punk built into provinces where music more openly embraces the attributes of the actor, taking a stance of ebullient knowingness toward the abundant variety and complex artifice on the fringes of pop. He's very clever with frames, using vocal inflections and contextual cues to pack whole ways of life into deceptively simple lines. On his previous full-length record, 2007's Night Falls Over Kortedala, he sang, "I was slicing up an avocado/ When you came up behind me." Not much on paper, but when activated by Lekman's exaggeratedly tony diction and cozy music, it captured the texture of a contemporary bourgeois existence in one gnomic stroke. The Lucksmiths were great at this same kind of evocative shorthand, though Lekman brings to it a slightly more jaundiced eye.
Lekman's new An Argument with Myself EP is a compact gem. It tilts this way and that to show different facets of the singer: his ruminative side, his topical side, his devotional side, his wicked humor, skewed insight, and flawless banality. At less than 18 minutes, there isn't a wasted moment. Each song does something distinct both sonically and lyrically, filtering one rarified but relatable sensibility through guise after revealing guise. We meet Lekman the flâneur, the desultory anecdotalist, the affable trickster. You can practically see the emotions mugging on his face as he gets into character, the startled eyes or the lopsided grin. There are elements of droll pastiche, like how the goofy horns on "New Directions" take a seamless turn to resemble the augustly rational Jean-Joseph Mouret music made famous by Masterpiece Theater. But Lekman is equally a throwback to songwriters like Paul Simon; gifted raconteurs who weren't afraid to try just about anything and trusted their sweet, creamy voices to make it work.
If Lekman owes Simon any debt, it's paid in full on the title track, a sparkling Afro-Caribbean whirl that sounds like a 21st-century European's answer to Graceland. The elliptically conversational lyrics, the clotted backing harmonies, the thin line between singing and mellifluous speech, the existential undertow of Lekman's self-interrogation while wandering through Melbourne, his new home-- Simon probably would’ve stopped short of crying "Why ya' hitting yourself? Why ya' hitting yourself?" but otherwise they're totally simpatico. Lekman's thoughts meander with his footsteps, which lead him in surprising but just-right directions. There's a song about stalking Kirsten Dunst while she filmed Melancholia in Lekman's native Gothenburg that works overtime as both an ode to provincialism and a protracted joke, complete with a droopy slide-whistle punchline. And whenever we find our own feet in a song, Lekman pulls the rug out from under us. He uses key changes to signal transitions between social criticism and personal pledges on the convalescence card "A Promise", and switches narrative perspective midstream on the plush reggae closer so that what we initially heard as snarky small talk is suddenly bathed in a touching romantic glow.
There's a lot to be said for exploring the nuances of clichés in songwriting, and most of it has been said. Listening to Lekman makes me sharply aware of how the generic and the cryptic have come to dominate pop lyrics, from Lady Gaga on down to Girls. The modern lingua franca is an abstract slipstream of memories, slogans, admonitions, and impressions, as if emotional states were free-floating entities, unmoored from specific experiences. This mode is ideal for self-projection and introspection, both valuable quantities. But Lekman's music makes me think more about other people than myself. For all of their polished mannerisms, his songs are uncommonly free of pretenses-- they're about people, places, and things that happened or could happen in the world; about how we spend our time and how we talk to each other. Against a backdrop of enigmatic universalism, musicians who undertake the ticklish business of pinning down the minutiae of human affairs are very dear. Alongside Dan Bejar and Bill Callahan, Jens Lekman stands tall among them.
