Review Summary: Imagine Jim Carrey in Yes Man after all those Red Bulls. Now imagine Jim Carrey as a female Swedish indie-pop singer with a penchant for saxophones and boy-girl harmonies, and you have this gem from the Great White North.
It’s been three years since Swedish indie-pop flag bearers Love Is All hit the scene with their critically-acclaimed debut Nine Times That Same Song, and while the absence saw the band mature in more ways than one, including marriages, children, and less-than-friendly partings, their sound is still as hyperactively infectious as ever. A frenetic collection of eleven songs that clocks in at under 35 minutes, A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night more than lives up to its title with enough sugary pop to match a case of Red Bull.
That is, if you can deal with lead vocalist Josephine Olausson’s unique Bjork-on-speed style. Fairly crackling with energy, Olausson powers along on a high-pitched vibrato that squeals just as much as it harmonizes. While at times disconcerting, as on opener “New Beginnings,” Olausson for the most part is able to keep her more screechy impulses in check, and male vocal counterpart Nicholaus Sparding does an effective job complementing her with a more restrained, indie loverboy approach.
Musically, A Hundred Things is exactly what you would expect from Love Is All. Hi-hats piston up-and-down, snare drums beat with rapid-fire, military precision, guitars bounce along like a pogo stick from some sort of Elvis Costello hell, and the melodies are as sweet as ever. The band’s lyrics are appropriately cheeky at times (the irrepressibly hopeful “Movie Romance”) and at others more serious (but only slightly more), as on the breakup anthem “Give It Back.” Some melodies are drenched in waves of guitar-fuzz feedback, while others ride swirling synths to pop-overdose levels, but all of them succeed in creating an atmosphere of undeniable fun.
Love Is All maintain the same animated, vivacious tempo on most of their songs, save for a couple oddballs like the endearing harmonica-ballad “A More Uncertain Future,” which features some of the best vocal interplay between Olausson and Sparding on the entire album. And while this one-track mind might turn away some listeners looking for more variety, it only helps to drive home the message of this admittedly one-dimensional, if admirably direct, album: dance until you can’t dance anymore, and if you’re not having fun, you might need to get your head checked.
