Mar. 31, 2010 - Issue #754: Don Juan

New Sounds

Love is All

As the naïvely optimisitic name might imply, there is something refreshingly childlike in the way Love Is All makes music.  Partly that manifests itself as a kind of happy tweeness—choruses that ring with harmonized "bah bah bah"s and music that resists hard edges in favour of bright, sunny hooks. But there's more to it than that: for starters, sonically they like to engage in a tuneful cacophony, angular, early-'00s guitars smashing into a baseline, bottom-flirting rhythm section and frequently chaotic saxophone (an instrument the group uses well enough to make you question its relative dearth in pop music). And though Love Is All has the standard pretty-music obsession with love, it confronts it with a bluntness that is not exactly tactless but certainly unashamedly bold.

All that's on evidence from the first song on the group's third full-length, Two Thousand and Ten Injuries. "Bigger, Bolder" opens with a cleaner version of the guitar line from "Last Nite," but it's quickly bouyed by saxaphone bleats and a bouncy bass, with a hint of classic electric organ by the time singer Josephine Olausson busts in with her sweetly snotty vocals. She vacillates between lines that could work as the motto for the Sex Olympics—"Hotter, wetter / Larger, longer"—and a bald admission, "There's no sense in trying to make this smart / I simply hate every minute that we're apart," the music following the raw sexiness all the way.

"Less Than Thrilled" ventures into more emotionally complex territory, Olausson running into an old flame that she dumped whose life has turned out just fine. With guitar flicking in the back, a playful bass and rising synth textures, Olausson tries to prove that she's grown, but her initial reluctant admission "I guess I'm glad you're OK," quickly turns, in the face of an attractive girlfriend, to the tempered-but-truthful "I didn't expect you to be here / And now I don't know what to say / I'm less than thrilled you're OK," the last line chanted in a call-and-response before the song abruptly ends.


That two-minute burst stands as Two Thousand and Ten Injuries' highlight, but there are little gems sprinkled throughout. "Never Now"'s guitar flits around like a branch in the wind while Olausson pleads to "slow down, hit the brakes" like someone genuinely scared of ruining a good thing. "The Birds Were Singing With All Their Might" channels mid-career Talking Heads drums into a recollection of a fantastic day. "A Side in a Bed" is another highlight; sounding sort of like the xx on a sunny summer day, Olausson begins by sighing out a list of romantically specific wishes—a side in a bed, a place in somebody's head, her head resting on an arm—before crying out for them, joined by a chorus of "ah"s. It is not the most artful expression of such, but damned if "I want to be somebody's favourite / I have to be somebody's favourite" doesn't have a way of hitting your emotions right in the stomach.

And again, it's that sort of emotional simplicity bumping up against free-spirited music, that's much of Love Is All's charm. We maybe don't have a lot to learn from children, but acting like them every so often is an awfully nice catharsis. V

Love is All
Two Thousand and Ten Injuries
(Polyvinyl Recording Co)

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