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Once in a while you can gauge a performer’s genuineness by how much his or her music doesn’t fit in, they haven’t taken their chords to the next level of oddity to create a new sound and they won’t have a label tacked on them. On Two Way Monologue, you could say Sondre Lerche drifts from folk-pop to emo - in the sense that they are emotional and attract scores of young hipsters - to indie-rock and even hearkens back to Beatle-esque pop. But truly, Norway’s Sondre Lerche doesn’t fit in, he delivers his emotions in the form of music, wearing his heart on his sleeve and seeming to care only about how well he can convey it in song rather than how trendy the music is, though there’s a lot of style here.
Track listing:
01 Love You
02 Track You Down
03 On the Tower
04 Two Way Monologue
05 Days That Are Over
06 Wet Ground
07 Counter Spark
08 It's Over
09 Stupid Memory
10 It's Too Late
11 It's Our Job
12 Maybe You're Gone
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Lerche started playing the guitar at age eight, and much like Bright Eyes’s Conor Oberst, Lerche really got into writing music around the age of fourteen and quickly began putting out heartfelt confessionals that were quickly adored. It was at that age that he began writing the songs on his acclaimed first album, The Faces Down, and has taken a more poppish, "minimalist," to use his own description, turn and shown us what he’s learned since in Two Way Monologue, for one, that love is complex. Lerche takes all that complexity in so sweetly, his mellow voice calmly accepting the turmoil of relationships.
Photo Credit: Mick Rock
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The first song, an instrumental called “Love You,” sets the tone with swerving strings while maintaining an upbeat feel, demonstrating Lerche’s poise under the pressures of love. It’s like a stroll in the city on a rainy day, it’s lovely, things are moving, and it’s cloudy. The first lines of the album, “down came the sky, and all you did was blink, I would cry like I never do in order to stay true” also clues you in on the mood of this album and the lyrical themes here. Lerche’s lyrics run from being poetic and thought provoking to achingly honest to bizarre (“I saw you, you saw me, you were naked, which was weird”), lyrics also comparable to those of Bright Eyes in their honesty and poetic sensibilities, yet Lerche takes a more reflective approach. He’s considered it all, swallowed the bitter pill, and this is what he has to offer, while the message in itself is never bitter. Lerche perfects these sentiments with the music, each one has a unique arrangement, with instrumentation running from accordion on “Maybe You’re Gone” to pedal steel on “Stupid Memory” to French horn on the aforementioned, “Love You,” and Lerche has made sure that each arrangement fits the sentiment. And that’s why if you’ve ever experienced these emotions, analyzed relationships, missed someone terribly, or been in love, these songs can really take you in.
It’s this perfection of blending the sentiment with the music that makes it so appealing and personal, as well as his uniqueness. And that’s no wonder, considering his influences run from Jeff Buckley to Burt Bacharach to Cole Porter, influences which can be detected, along with glimmers of early Paul McCartney among others. But it’s still all Sondre Lerche, if you like good songwriting, and if you've ever been confused by love or enjoy the occasional revel in relationships gone by, there’s something on here for you.
-Jennifer Hall 04/17/04
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