If you’ve browsed around MySpace looking at music profiles you might have noticed the genre designation “Melodramatic Popular Song” adorning the odd profile. It’s one of my favorite made-up genre-names because it sets up huge expectations of what the band sounds like. The phrase “Melodramatic Popular Song” conjures up all sorts of images, and it could mean any number of things, but what it imports more than anything is pomposity, self-importance, and scope. It’s a phrase that one might reserve only for the epic songcraft and hammy showmanship of a bygone era. And it’s not often that bands, even ones with a sense of melodrama and a tight grasp on Pop songwriting, sound like that.
I wasn’t looking at MySpace when I heard sample-happy Swedish Indie-Pop troubadour Jens Lekman’s new album Night Falls Over Kortedala, but my first thought as the orchestral bombast and histrionically romantic lyricism of album-opener “And I Remember Every Kiss” poured from my speakers was “that’s some Melodramatic Popular Song right there.” Jens made me sit up and pay attention with his intro, but the second tune “Sipping On the Sweet Nectar” took my breathe away with chimes, flute-trills and hand-drums giving way to thumping kicks and bubbly bass for a Big-Band Disco sound not unlike Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band as Lekman sings of love, death, and regret in a Morrissey-esque baritone. A couple tracks later “A Postcard to Nina,” where a story about acting as a beard for a lesbian friend on a visit to meet her religious father is slathered over a succulent track reminiscent of the soulful Pop of James & Bobby Purify and select Motown hits, confirmed Lekman’s musical genius. And with the Brill Building-influenced Synthpop of “I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You,” the Bacharach/Warwick sounding Pop-Soul of “If I Could Cry (It Would Feel Like This),” the string-plucks, hand-claps and drum-programming of “Your Arms Around Me,” and the Doo-Wop-meets-Hip-Hop of “Kanske Är Jag Kär i Dig” still to come, a place on year-end best-of lists was all but assured.
Listen to “A Postcard to Nina”
While Sweden seems to produce a preponderance of musicians with an affinity for overwrought theatrical displays of emotion that wouldn’t seem out of place on the Broadway stage, or an old Smiths record, the last artist to blindside me with a timeless style akin to Lekman was a floppy-haired Manhattenite named Baby Dayliner. I happened to see a video for his tune “Silent Places” which reminded me of the heyday of “alternative” music videos on 120 Minutes and made me want to hear the rest of his record Critics Pass Away. But rather than an exercise in Alt-Rock revivalism it turned out to be an album full of emotive Pop songwriting backed by an array of samples, breakbeats, synthesizers, and traditional band-style live instrumentation that betrayed a man out of time, making music that would have found him crooning in front of an orchestra in a tuxedo in another era, but which is better crafted in one’s bedroom with modern technology in ours.
Musical melodrama may in fact not be all that popular any more, but people like me will always feel like busting out into spontaneous song at the knowledge that there are still artists making it.
-El Keter
