Sondre Lerche: Sondre Lerche

Sondre Lerche

Mona

Jun 06, 2011 #36 - Music vs. Comedy By Jim Scott

The early appeal of Sondre Lerche was that his clean sound and unabashed pop leanings felt like an antidote to the scraggly masses. A decade later, though he's grown in a variety of ways, Lerche sounds much the same. Besides his forays into jazz (Duper Sessions) and harder pop (Phantom Punch), neither of which sounded radically different from his other records, Lerche has been building a solid, if unspectacular career making airtight pop music.

It's hard not to imagine half of Sondre Lerche ending up on a soundtrack somewhere, which is both a compliment and a criticism. On the plus side, such songs as "Private Caller," "Ricochet," "When the River," and "Domino" have the potential for such things because they're well-crafted, lovely songs. "Domino," especially, contains some of Lerche's finest lyrics, "Try teleporting and/try ammunition/Turns out somebody else/screwed up the mission." Lerche has a voice free from the strains and groans that many performers take on as an affect intended to indicate passion. Lerche's passion is all in his inflection and his volume.

On the other hand, the music's suitability for a movie is also one of its greatest weaknesses. Lerche falls back on cliché more often than he used to ("Take my hand/and twist my arms") but that alone isn't worth much condemnation. Rather, his music is evocative of a very general, hard to pin down nostalgia. After further listening, however, Lerche seems to be balling a variety of sources into one, somewhat vanilla, older sound. Older here meaning anything from the '50s to the '70s AM singer/songwriters. In the end, the comfort of a Sondre Lerche album is what also makes it forgettable. (www.sondrelerche.com)

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