RIYL: The Cranberries, Club 8, The Clientele
Think of European, the third album by Swedish popsters Sambassadeur, like nine women walking in and out of the room that you’re sitting in. Each one of them is lovely, the kind of girl you’d love to take home to Mom. But that first girl…she’s breathtaking, to the point where she haunts your thoughts long after she’s gone, while the other women are forgotten as soon as they’ve left. This is a beautiful record, tastefully adorned with strings, chimes, gently plucked acoustic guitars, and the sweetly heartbreaking vocals of Anna Persson, who recalls Dolores O’Riordan but without the braying. “I Can Try” is pure early ’90s indie pop, and “Sandy Dunes” is blue-eyed Motown a la Texas’ “Black Eyed Boy.” The production is crisp, and the performances are competent without being overly fancy.
So why does it leave so small a footprint? Because the songs all have to follow the piano and string-kissed “Stranded,” far and away the best track here. Pretty as the rest of European may be, it’s too slight to hold up against that killer opening track. It sounds awfully good while it’s playing, but it doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression. (Labrador 2010)
As slight and pretty as a sundress on the first day of June, Kelley Ryan’s Twist finds the astroPuppees frontwoman making a deliberate shift away from what she calls “the rock boy way” of doing things, and toward a gentler sound, driven largely by acoustic guitars and layers of lush harmonies. Ryan’s in good company here, too: She recorded Twist with Don Dixon and Marti Jones, drafted Van Dyke Parks to lend string arrangements to a pair of tracks, and dug into the Beck songbook for a cover of “Lost Cause.” All solid marks in Twist’s favor, to be certain, and when the album lives up to its pedigree – as on the shimmering, gently descending opening track, “About a Girl” – it feels like a long-lost artifact from the golden mid ‘80s era of jingle-jangly singer-songwriter pop. Too often, though, Ryan uses her stylistic shift as a license to hide behind arrangements that don’t do much besides lie there and look pretty, or rhyme “love” with “above.” The end result is an album that might leave you feeling like you’ve just woken up from a pleasant dream – it’s soft, and warm, and no more than five minutes after it’s over, you won’t remember a thing. It’ll add an interesting wrinkle for astroPuppees fans, but there’s no shortage of similar-sounding records, and for anyone who isn’t already familiar with Ryan’s work, this really isn’t enough of a Twist. (Manatee Records 2010)