44 :: Love is All

Ten times that same song: those same drawn crashes, terse hi-hats, those same bloozy, bleating horns, leering and lilting vocals, same trilling guitars, those echoes, these echoes, same echoes, et cetera and then some. Love is All’s debut record is a blast of sounds, all of them repeating, surfacing again in other forms on other songs but still, inarguably, the same sounds in the same songs. Ten times.

But unlike, say, Beirut’s Gulag Orkestar, which fired nifty sonic bottle rockets off an otherwise staid ground, Love is All shoot these elements out with precision and aplomb, creating brilliant nighttime displays that bloom, explode, crash, shudder and fizz in righteously structured harmony. The limited elements aren’t schtick: they draw attention to the band’s considerable songcraft, as if to say, “Look at all the tricks we can do with this slight handful of sound.” And so those horns and hi-hats and cat-calls build against each other, tense and dynamic. This is calamitous, ass-shaking stuff — “hip,” to be sure, very Brooklyn, but in the correct way, and by that I mean not actually from Brooklyn but from Sweden. This band sounds like bands that are from Brooklyn are supposed to sound but never do. The influences are all there: Love is All burns through Wire, X-Ray Specs, some fills from Entertainment! (1979) with a Slits sneer, but the depth of commitment to their sonic aesthetic and limited palette imbues the music with veracity, virility, and an all-important sincerity.
Credit them, too, for weaving through this blast a respectable post-Radioheadian take on media overload. Josephine Olausson’s saturating vocals give loud, emotionless recall of movie marathons, unfeeling and still, until she turns the radio off to get some rest. Her vocals sound bored of media but unable to shake the habit. Her boredom and disaffection find their necessary counterpoint in the music, though, in the handful of sounds arrayed with incendiary care.