Love Is All
A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night
(What’s Your Rupture?, 2008)

The first track on Love Is All’s second full-length is called “New Beginnings”, but it picks right up where debut Nine Times That Same Song left off, with wiry guitars and squelchy horns and jetpacked percussion and Josephine Olausson’s somewhat nasally Swedish scream-singing about romantic disappointment: “In a taxi going home, way too early, on your own.”

Elsewhere, catch Olausson “laugh[ing] in the face of movie romance” in the sugar-rush “Movie Romance,” and left at the party in the more melancholy “Last Choice”, a song narrated with a short story’s eye for telling detail and resonantly familiar anecdote. Both songs are blessed with ascending horn sections and, in the latter case, one-note-at-a-time keyboards, so each synthetic exhalation sounds lonely. (Though the all-together-now chorus is like Olausson had previously observed—“inappropriately upbeat.”)

The keyboard sounds differently in “Wishing Well”—in fact, it sounds exactly like that birthday-party key riff that starts off “Tally Ho” by the Clean. (The perfectly sequenced first track on their Anthology, love at first hearing.) With that joy on its side, “Wishing Well” is probably the bounciest, catchiest song about spiritual void in who knows how long: “Threw my money in a wishing well, but nothing got better, only slightly wet.”

It’s hard to be funny in your second language—isn’t it?—but Love Is All amuse throughout: Their lyrics are wryly specific, coming from a distance, like a lonely observer, and probably getting an ironic edge from the exuberance from the music. Take “Sea Sick”, about the myth of escapism: Olausson tries to get away but ends up “bored to death aboard this ship,” and having “more teriyaki than I could bear” at the all-you-can-eat dinners, all related over a “bah-bah-bah” breakdown.

It’s easy to talk about a pop band’s origins like they explain anything, or everything—especially if that band is Scandinavian, where, or so the stereotype (and its many pieces of supporting evidence) goes, all the bands make perfect English-language pop songs with the heartbreaking romanticism of a high school yearbook. But the Swedes of Love Is All really truly couldn’t be anything but: They’re a perfect Scandinavian house party band with their jumpy all-at-the-same-time production, and then sense of leaving the dance floor and walk home by the streetlamps, collar turned up to face the cold. Album closer “19 Floors” sees Olausson admitting, “I just don’t like to interact,” and reciting a checklist of her socially averse behaviors (with cutting accuracy, like how she takes the stairs rather than having to talk to a neighbor in the elevator); the title track is a confession of private fear in the face of the incomprehensible bigness of life and death and eternity: “I curse the universe / Big bugs, black holes, meteorites, a hundred things keep me up at night.” But these anthems of insularity are also singalongs, celebrations of how it feels to be a teenager, in the basement, lip-synching into a hairbrush while friends strum on tennis rackets and broomsticks. The squalling, compulsively ear-pleasing A Hundred Things Keep Me Up All Night is the soundtrack to bipolarity—or else Love Is All knows all about the simultaneous joy and yearning of pop music, but can’t help itself from falling head-over-heels every time.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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