Susanne Sundfør - Ten Love Songs

According to Susanne Sundfør, the Norwegian singer/songwriter/producer, she set out to write an album about violence and ended up with Ten Love Songs.  Fair enough. The album's title is technically accurate, but a little misleading.  Each song on Sundfør's beautiful followup to The Silicon Veil is about love, but not in the traditional pop way.  The album opens with the "So, it's definite then. It's written in the stars, darling. Everything must come to an end."  Sundfør focuses on the realities of real-world love and the disillusionment that comes with the realization that it looks, feels, and operates very differently than the starry-eyed infatuation to which pop music so often refers when talking about "love".  Love isn't all you need.  Sometimes love looks an awful lot like knowing, willful commitment to mutually assured destruction.  People once truly, deeply in love can, and often do, drift apart.  That may seem really heavy, but those are just the first three songs.  Don't let the themes fool you, though.  The lyrics are never tedious or swollen.  Sundfør has a knack for conveying complicated messages through simple, careful pop lyricism.  "Is that the sound of your heart? It sounds lonely" says quite a lot without actually saying much, all sung over a gently driving disco beat.  She doesn't get lost in the genre, either.  She's still the same artist that titled her first album The Brothel.  Her idiosyncrasies come through amid the programmed basses and drums.  The arrangements and production take the dark synth-folk leanings of her last album and whatever lessons learned from her recent work with collaborators Royksopp and M83 -- both of whom show up on this album -- to culminate in an accessible sound that can dance, brood, swoon, and lament.  The consistent use of physical, tangible instruments -- admittedly run through layers and layers of effects -- played by real-live musicians helps to ground the dancy sound with an organic feel that anchors the songs.  All of this without saying a word about her incredible, hauntingly otherworldly voice.  Sundfør is a singular talent, with command of every aspect of songwriting and delivery, but her voice may be her strongest asset.  No one sounds like her.  Wildly expressive without ever being boisterous, able to sound distant and detached, but always vulnerable.  When she sings about loneliness, you believe her.  And she sings about loneliness a lot.