Lake Heartbeat – Trust in Numbers
Is the British latter-noughties penchant for for bone-china Scandinavian voices and imported fresh-air pop finally reaching it’s zenith with the turn of the decade? Hopefully not for Swedes Janne Kask and Kalla Kåks who together form Lake Heartbeat, Trust in Numbers being their opening shot on scandophile indie –pop purveyors Service.
Immediate contemporary comparisons gravitate towards Phoenix and their seemingly like-minded, unabashed, soft-hitting pop stylings. But while Trust In Numbers is undoubtedly on-the-nose in an era of painfully self-aware post-post-modern inside-out irony, there’s a glassy shell of sadness and that lends this album a certain cloudy-eyed charm.
At Trust in Number’s core is a featherlike melancholy that flutters down like snow on a deserted beach resort. It constantly thrums under the sheen and sparkle of Dan Lissvik’s midas production. Outwardly a swirling procession of crisp dream pop, under the steady drift is a throbbing kernel of sadness that adds weight, like a solitary, drooping raincloud in a summer sky.
Janne Kask sighs his breathy vocals that unselfconsciously meditate on life and love and loss. Seemingly unconcerned by any impulses to use abstraction to disguise the heart-opening lyrical subject matter, negating the obligatory parade of endless tortured analogies that might have knocked the wind out of the breezy, elegant compositions.
Indeed, it might not sound like it, but this risky music to make. To write a collection of shimmering bittersweet songs, openly wandering among such well-trodden ground as love and loss is to risk ending up with a slew of bland, broad, dinner-party silence filler unless you really have a good idea of what it is you’re doing.
For the British listener opener Mystery instantly invokes a more authentic era of pop music, setting a standard early on with a purposeful roll of lush hooks swirling into a satisfyingly crisp three minutes of melodic introspection. Similarly Southbound resounds with the appeal of a more innocent pop music philosophy, it would sound at home crackling through the cassette player of a 1984 Astra on a rainy drive home, steady claps and relaxed synths gently splashing into cascade of blissed-out vintage pop chorus melodics, an honest-hearted and well rounded track that epitomises the spirit of the whole record.
Trust in Numbers is the chilly sensation of viewing Summer though the frosted lens of Winter. A vision of warmth through a icy veneer of cold. Kask uses this to peer at the universal yearning for an intangible truth, a mystery that lies just outside of the borderlands of perception.
Latter album wobbles might threaten to drift dangerously into dreary Starbucks ambience territory at times, but a constant flickering pulse and unflinching sincerity lends Trust in Numbers a sufficiently fresh and intriguing aural aesthetic to make it a very worthwhile alternative Wintertime listen.
8
