Loney dear – A Lantern and a Bell
Real World – 26 March 2021
There’s nothing florid about Loney dear’s new album, A Lantern and a Bell. The nine songs feel so frail and simple that a slight breeze might blow them away. Yet there are unexpected depths at every turn. Emil Svanängen has created something quite special, a masterpiece in the art of less is more. There is nothing for Svanängen to hide behind, each track features little more than a piano, perhaps some bass, along with distant sounds of a synthesizer. Yet the emotional power of his songs and language transport listeners to places they have never been before.
A collage of soft strange sounds quickly gives way to a piano softly playing thick chords as Svanängen beings to sing “Mute – All things pass” in a falsetto, sounding a bit like Robert Wyatt. “I walked out in the young night/ Also young, knowing nothing/ Mighty ships hung over ground.” The song builds slowly, adding a synth line, then turning up the volume. It’s minimal but never overly so, in fact by the piece’s end it feels remarkably full.
Everything falls away again as “Habibi (A clear black line)” begins with a single piano that continues throughout, yet never really follows a straight line. Lyrically the song follows a similar path, turning this way and that, “These are no good times/ And if you knew what it was/ No guiding bright star leading you home.” One is left slightly up in the air whether the time period is supposed to be today or some war from years ago. The only certainty is that the singer was talked down from going over the edge.
There’s a magic that builds over and over again in “Trifles” even though there are moments of incredible anguish. “I lay in your bed/ These times you’re not hеre/ I was the crowd/ You wore thе crown here.” The first half of the song ends with the sounds of whistling. Yet the second half tells a separate tell of sadness at someone’s departure. A stately, almost church-bound grace fills “Go Easy on Me Now (Sirens + emergencies)” where the singer is clearly losing his way fearing he may never get it back.
For some reason “Last Night – Centurial Procedures (the 1900s)” reminds me musically of a slightly cracked version of Graham Nash’s “Our House.” Something about the piano playing seems like a distant cousin, while the lyrics relate, “Cheek to cheek/ Did I kiss you did I go?/ The last time I met you/ Was the first time I knew.” Sometimes the simplest songs of love are the most powerful.
Power comes in many forms as evidenced by “Oppenheimer.” Yet there’s also something quite strange about it as Svanängen describes, “It’s crazy, the fact that during that nuclear age, the atomic bomb was the future and it was popular culture. And the fact that the bikini was the latest fashion product and they named it after where they detonated an atomic bomb just tells you so much.”
Nine songs, fragile enough to blow away in a strong breeze, yet A Lantern and a Bell highlights how much Loney dear can do simply by stripping tunes back to their essential elements. These are songs that haunt your soul and hold you in their thrall.
Photo Credit: Fotograf Per Kristiansen