Au Revoir Simone: "Shadows (Jens Lekman remix)"

In terms of recent output, Jens Lekman has been oh so silent. Since the release of Night Falls Over Kortedala (2007), the formerly prolific Swedish singer-songwriter has had little more than a handful of guest appearances to his name. He contributed one song to the Sweptaways’ debut, sang covers of Magnetic Fields and Lee Hazlewood songs with Tracey Thorn, released a mixtape featuring a teaser-length portion of the song “New Directions,” and played a handful of shows in Australian backyards through which he may or may not have been working on new material. However an actual album—or an EP, or a single even—has yet to be seen, heard, or even hinted at.

Oddly, then, this remix of an Au Revoir Simone song from last year’s Still Night, Still Light marks his return of sorts. Lekman isn’t known as a remixer; he wrote once that Kortedala centerpiece “I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You” began as a remix of the Tough Alliance’s “Take No Heroes” that then became “some kind of symphonic soul” before evolving into a song of his own, and something similar happens here. He opts to jettison the band’s synthesizers and drum machines completely, leaving just their voices atop a fairly typical production of his, a collection of orchestral samples and rhythm tracks reminiscent of Studio’s production work on El Perro Del Mar and Taken By Trees’ albums released last year. He even repeats the descending accordion riff from “Into Eternity” a few times.

Most critically, however, Lekman eliminates the chorus’s turning point entirely. When the original hits the line “I’m moving on, I hope you’re coming with me / ‘cause I can’t live without you,” it lands on a minor chord that amplifies the longing and desperation that could’ve been at their arrangement’s very center. This version plays up that line’s first half as extensively as possible, and the melancholy at the center of this departure is now marked by a formerly-absent optimism, effectively flipping the song’s sentiment on its head.

While I can safely assume that Night Light will be a mess like pretty much every track-by-track remix album before it, what’ll happen on Lekman’s third full-length is anyone’s guess. He works with a very specific set of sounds, but within that space he repeatedly proves himself to be deviating, experimenting, and rebuilding. He looks for new ways to explore dialogue and declarations and to imbue simple, sometimes seemingly inane ideas with baffling replayability. I can only hope that he breaks that silence sometime soon.