The cover of Jens Lekman’s “I Know What Love Isn’t” features a photo of trench coat-clad Lekman wandering on some vast and unidentifiable desert as if he were starring in a mopey stage adaptation of The Little Prince.
Keeping with the idea of The Little Prince, imagine Lekman’s album in two acts. Act I: Lekman, endearing and childlike (and dressed completely inappropriately for the desert), wanders aimlessly in search of requited love and, alternately, someone to draw him a sheep in the foam of his cappuccino. Act II: Lekman gives up on love (yet again) and settles for a cop-out relationship to end his utter alienation. Then he willfully lets his girlfriend poison him, and the stars echo forevermore with the twinkling of his bicycle bell.
Okay, I didn’t say I had worked out the plot flawlessly.
The album art is sort of the perfect visual representation of Lekman’s particular brand of breakup pop: Yeah, he’s wandering in an endless, uninhabitable desert of nothingness, but if he ever does encounter another human being, he’s going to look damn good for them in his perfectly unaffected black trench coat.
On the album, Lekman sings about how alone he is, but he also flawlessly communicates that he’s got the charming self-deprecation and savvy pop-cultural references to be an awesome partner for somebody one day. One day…
The track “Erica America” sounds essentially like someone made a copy of an old Belle & Sebastian song using Swedish Silly Putty. Is this echo of an admittedly-beloved-but-already-done indie band a bad thing? Absolutely not.
Songs like “Erica America” are the bread and butter of that preciously mild misanthropy we call “Twee.” And to be honest, Lekman is doing wonders for the genre. With vaguely Morrissey-esque vocal stylings, duets with indie girls, songs about driving around, songs about yearning to be in a relationship, and songs about hating people who are in relationships, I Know What Love Isn’t could easily be a cornerstone Twee album.
And where would we be if we didn’t have people like Lekman to provide the perfect soundtrack for outcast and romantically unsuccessful high school age boys for generations to come?
Yet tracks like “Some Dandruff On Your Shoulder” suggest that Lekman’s understanding of romantic failure comes from first-hand experience. Which raises the question: if Lekman, arguably the most sensitive and lovably Scandinavian person on the planet, can’t get his shit together relationship-wise, then what hope is there for us normal folks, still trying to find somebody to tolerate our continued existence?
Therein lies the trap: this is the kind of thinking that makes people listen to Twee, but it’s also the kind of thinking that Twee encourages. Nick Hornby probably summed it up best when he asked, “Was I miserable because I listened to pop music, or did I listen to pop music because I was miserable?”
Lekman knows exactly what he’s doing. These lyrics require serious effort, even if they represent a musical genre that is more or less wholly antithetical to exerting effort.
Rhyming “apologize” with “anthologize” may be simple, but it remains probably the most goddamned adorably indie thing I can imagine. And while I’m not certain that Lekman’s lyric “I don’t know what love is/but I know what it isn’t” is a nod to Billy Bragg’s “I don’t know what love is/but I look into your eyes/I know that it isn’t there,” I’d feel comfortable giving Lekman credit for that level of referential reverence to his folk forefathers. Why? Because he deserves all of the fan-love he can get.
But for the sake of moody teenagers everywhere, let’s hope that Lekman never completely finds the fulfillment of true romantic love.
An upbeat album from Lekman would probably be a disaster, and losing him to his home asteroid B-612 would undoubtedly prove a devastating blow to the genre.
