Jens Lekman: "The End of the World is Bigger Than Love"

It’s fairly apparent from its title alone that the new Jens Lekman song, his first to see official release in three years, is essentially more of the same. It opens to sampled-sounding strings, cribs its chorus melody knowingly from Weiss, Peretti & Creatore’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and sports loaded turns of phrase that only he could get away with. Melodically, the song is gorgeous, and its bouncing rhythm helps to make clear the optimism at the core of what’s otherwise a breakup song.

Lekman’s real coup, however, is in how rich this music is with sonic detail. As much as I like his lyrics, it’s the small things that make this so replayable: the ascending pitch-bent tone that comes between verses, the various percussive sounds, the wall of voices that precedes the chorus before it comes in the second time. All of these help to make the arrangement bigger and even more grandiose, building towards Lekman’s point—that his problems are ultimately his, and ultimately insignificant to all but himself—while he precedes to build a shrine to this fact. In the song’s bridge, he references landmarks in New York (including the Target on Flatbush Avenue, described by all of my friends who have been inside as “poorly organized and perpetually understocked”) and concedes that the end of the world is “Bigger than our problems and our inability to solve them,” and when he does, it hits far harder than it has any right to.

If this and the songs he’s been playing on recent tours are any indication, Lekman’s direction hasn’t changed much since 2007, but it has become even more uniquely his. His songwriting style and approach to arranging has coalesced totally with his worldview, and he no longer sounds much like anyone else at all. Lekman’s music stands somewhere between one-liners, autobiography, and sly pushes toward striking truths. Which all makes the wait for his next album, whenever that may be, all the more frustrating.