3rd September - Jens Lekman's I Know What Love Isn't

Artist – Album: Jens Lekman – I Know What Love Isn’t

Released:  3^rd September 2012

Sounds Like: Someone’s hurt our Jens

It’s been 20 days since I moved into the new place, and I am still living in the dark ages (i.e. without easy access to the internet). To paraphrase Homer and Marge Simpson:

“No TV and no internet make Joe… something, something…”
“…Go crazy?”
“Don’t mind if I do!”

On the plus side, the lack of distraction has allowed me to immerse myself fully in my music and the albumaday… project, although that still has the potential to drive one mad: the inability to post my blog; the difficulty in researching; the interminable Elbow albums. Today’s album, for example, is not one that I own on CD and I somehow seem to have lost it from my itunes. Without effortless access to Spotify, Deezer or Last FM, I’ve been forced to watch snatched snippets of Jens on YouTube on my phone. Not ideal. And yet…

Regular readers (go on, I know there’s at least one of you!) will know that I’m a huge fan of Jen Lekman’s music (and that I have a bit of a man-crush on him, but we won’t go in to that…). His early music tended to deal in euphoric pastiches of sampled strings, cymbals, handclaps and glockenspiels, gentle, soothing piano ballads, or flighty, ukulele-led indie tracks, culminating in possible career highlight Night Falls Over Kortedala, his 2007 album. I Know What Love Isn’t is the follow up, but it’s strikingly different. This time he’s backed by a full band rather than his library of samples, and the music is a few notches down from the excitable previous record. Also, Lekman appears to have had his heartbroken in between, as he sings of heartache on each and every track.

Fortunately, whatever she did to him seems not to have upset his trademark wit, as his lyrics are still scattered with the usual black humour. Take the beautiful closing song ‘Every Hair Knows Your Name’: “started working out when we broke up, I can do one hundred push-ups. I could probably do two if I was bored”. And this is the crux of the album – it’s still funny, it’s still full of music that gets stuck in your head, it’s still Jens and it’s still good.

Albumaday... rating: 7/10

1.       Every Little Hair Knows Your Name – 1:26

2.       Erica America – 3:56

3.       Become Someone Else’s – 4:24

4.       Some Dandruff On Your Shoulder – 3:41

5.       She Just Don’t Want to Be With You Anymore – 3:53

6.       I Want a Pair of Cowboy Boots – 2:57

7.       The World Moves On – 6:11

8.       The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love – 4:41

9.       I Know What Love Isn’t – 3:34

10.   Every Little Hair Knows Your Name – 3:17 

Listen to ‘Become Someone Else’s’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoWHNDgGtbg