Saturday 05.16.09: 89.9 KCRW presents LONEY, DEAR / LIGHTS ON / AM

Posted by admin - filed in Events

With Loney, Dear, you get the deeply personal songs, you get the rawness, but you also get a production masterclass and a gift for arrangement to make Brian Wilson smile. Never more so than on Dear John, which adds a new fondness for synths and electronic beeps and blips to Loney, Dear’s armoury. Naturally, such sounds are incorporated subtly into the trademark sound of Loney, Dear, aka Emil Svanangen; delicate beginnings, cyclical structures and lovingly layered build-ups that threaten to overpower Svanangen’s quiet, high-pitched voice, but somehow never quite do. The only time you wonder whether Svanangen hasn’t gone too far into electro noise is on Under a Silent Sea, when a synthesized simulation of the Psycho strings rends the air. It shouldn’t work, but somehow Svanangen makes it fit. It’s always the sign of an artist on top form that they have the confidence to sequence an album so the best tracks come at the end, and the final run here — the bouncy Summers; the wistful, voice-stretching Distant; the ominous Harm/Slow; the powerful Violent; the gorgeous Dear John — is really something special. – Times Online

With:
Lights On
AM