This is what Hannes Norrvide does as Lust for Youth: He sets up two simple melody lines on his Casio keyboard. He lets them ram ceaselessly into each other like abandoned go-karts. And then, over a muted thump of a drum machine, he hollers into the void. That's his entire M.O., and on paper it sounds about as appetizing as sucking stale air from an open freezer. But Norrvide makes surprisingly tactile, even sensual music this way, and on Perfect View, his second full length in only six months, he rides his own modestly cresting wave. He is still making the exact same sound, and it remains narrowly captivating in the exact same way.
The production on Perfect View is marginally cleaner and warmer than last fall's Growing Seeds, making it a lusher and prettier listen. But these are relative terms-- “unnerving” and “lonely” probably suit Lust for Youth better. Growing Seeds’ particular unnerving loneliness came not just from its sonic murk but from the traces of unease the murk failed to cover, and Perfect View, with its richer, mellower synths and deeper sound, brings Norrvide closer into focus. But his thick Swedish accent, muffled by reverb, still keeps us at an arms-length from his message: When he repeatedly chants the title of “I Found Love”, it sounds more like, “I’ve fallen off.”
Norrvide has insisted in interviews that his songs are about love, relationships, and morality. They probably are, but you'll find very little in this music to tell you so. What you'll hear, above all, is a firm belief in the comfort of synthesizers-- the wide, lonely bands of sound they make, the cottony feeling they leave in your mind. The song titles function like blank, terse placards-- "Another Day", "End", "Image"-- and the hum of the music acts similarly, as a mild anaesthetic, a small tonic for the times you'd rather erase your feelings for a few minutes than think about them.
Sifting through Perfect View to find highlightable moments proves surprisingly difficult: there's the nearly-funky bongo break on “Another Day”, the little bits of sampled speech that pop up on "Barcelona" and elsewhere; “Kirsten” and closer “I Found Love in a Different Place” turn the drum hits way up, and hint at what Lust for Youth might eventually sound like if Norrvide cleared his throat and demanded our undivided attention. But these details melt the minute you stop focusing on them, and I think Norrvide means them to. Listening normally, the songs blur together like fan blades, and it's hard to tell how long you've been listening to Perfect View. His is the ambient music of someone else's party, happening far away from where you are, and the distance is part of the allure.
