By Brandon Bussolini
It would be hard to take someone seriously if they told you they were addicted to music. The notion of addiction might have more purchase for books or movies, but listening to music compulsively seems like a given for this generation. Music "helps" - in the broadest sense of that word: it can be restorative or push you into productive discomfort, and can help articulate feelings that might not get very far on language alone.
It’s easy to listen to Love Is All’s new album, A Hundred Things Keep Me up at Night (What’s Your Rupture), like water, two times a day easy, on the bus trying to calm down. With each listen, the disc becomes less like a collection of songs and more like a collection of vignettes, ones that seem to capture something important about what it feels like to be in the midst of your second adolescence.
Vocalist Josephine Olausson knows how to throw a good tantrum, but even amid the more blown-out sentiments of “Give It Back,” her delivery is so much more than merely spiteful as she delivers the lines: “All the love I gave you, give it back / Every time I praised you, I’m keeping track / Every minute on the phone / It was only cos I felt so alone.”
Yet even if the sentiments are sometimes desperate, the music is always tight and kinetic. Olausson writes in an e-mail interview, “There's a lot of melody in everything we do, even if it's sometimes hidden behind many layers of energy…. As soon as we play together it all tends to be slightly too fast, and then live it tends to get even faster or more energetic than that…. It's ridiculous.” The following track, “Movie Romance,” almost goes off the rails plumbing the nauseating, insane joy of infatuation. In a sense, it forms a kind of mini-suite with “Give It Back,” together capturing the way time seems to both speed and crawl as you wait for things to cool off, then re-up.
The Gothenburg, Sweden, band’s other four members are not exactly slouching behind Olausson’s words, though. James Ausfahrt’s squiggly saxophone reaches back to the Brownie-punk of LiliPUT’s “Die Matrosen,” and Olausson’s keyboards on “Wishing Well” - directly lifted from the Clean’s “Tally Ho” - snuggle up towards kiwi tunefulness.
But where LiliPUT’s blood ran to frosty, powerfully rendered alienation, Love Is All dwells on the heat of the stickiest feelings, internalizing rather than performing self-critique. Olausson observes, “As songwriters we tend to try to avoid the most obvious way of "dressing" our songs.… I think we try to put something slightly disturbing in almost every song instead of making them too pretty on the surface.”
Even if the scenarios sketched out in the lyrics have an awful gravity to them, the group has too good a sense of humor and perspective to not realize that it’s all a big raw joke. When Olausson yelps, “Threw my money in a wishing well / nothing got better and I’m slightly wet,” in a bid to exercise some control over her uncertain future, we pogo along because we know these feelings won’t stop until, inexplicably, they do. It’s an impossible thing to imagine, but it’s not like this adolescence is any easier to see beyond than the last one.
LOVE IS ALL
With Vivian Girls, Nodzzz
Thurs/20, 8 p.m., $12-$14
Bottom of the Hill
1233 17th St., SF
(415) 621-4455
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