Oh You're So Silent Jens
Jens Lekman
Secretly Canadian; 2005
originally published October 7, 2010 on Probably Just Hungry
A man walks into a bar, orders a beer and a bowl of peanuts, but the bar turns into a spaceship, and the bartender gives him a haircut... ... I can’t remember the end of that joke. This record isn’t so much a selection of the artist’s songs as it is a collection of his one-liners. In a soulful baritone he cranks out little gems of stanzas including, but not limited to: Could it be what they call the northern lights? But here and at this time of year It’s like someone spilled a beer All over the atmosphere. or I had a friend who was slightly overweight that means fatass in the seventh grade. or I tried the light therapy From the Xerox-machine. or She said it was all make-believe, but I thought she said ”maple leaves”.
And when she talked about about the fall I thought she talked about Mark E. Smith. I never understood at all. Poor, clueless Jens. Lekman’s songwriting style is loose and ludicrous. Sitting directly in contrast is the sound of his work, which is usually rooted somewhere between old-school crooning of the ’40s, lush chamber pop of the ’60s, and twee-ish indie rock of the early ’00s. My only question, then, is what the hell is up with the album art? Three pastel triangles on a gauzy sky-blue background - it looks like something Georgia O’Keefe would have hung on her bathroom wall. I think in this case, it might be a good idea to sample the tracks first: ”Black Cab” ”A Sweet Summer’s Night on Hammer Hill” Everyone’s had a night like the one described in ”Black Cab”. The run-up to the story reads like a Greek tragedy: Victory -> Celebration -> Hubris -> Drama -> Ruin -> Abandonment -> Black Cab When we pick up with the forlorn songwriter, he’s just in time to curse at the back end of the last public transportation for the night. He’s forced to take the disreputable graveyard-shift taxis, ominously uniform in their dark color. Poor Jens even quotes one of his friends butchering his name (it’s actually pronouned ’yens’). Still, despite this shadowy circumstance, the song is bright and lively with a killer hook, a solid backbeat, and a one-word chorus. Next is ”A Sweet Summer’s Night on Hammer Hill”, which has the distinction of being one of the few songs in history to be nostalgic for Warren G. To be fair, most people have memories like those described in ”Hammer Hill” - a balmy summer night, a catchy radio single, the indescribable essence of youth. The crowds singing along raucously in the background add another layer to the track. He reaches past nostalgia and novelty and creates an earnest statement. It’s great fun and it’s all extremely honest. The songs are all solid, so what it really comes down to in the end is the album art. It could be a cubist landscape. Maybe an attempt at the Swedish folk art aesthetic? The colors could mirror the sunny instrumentation of the record. The shapes could be symbolic of the Holy Trinity. Could it be a play on the De Stijl movement?
The truth is that at the beginning of this post I didn’t have a clue; it could have been any of those things and I would have been none the wiser. Somewhere between then and now, though, I figured it out. And it sort of pissed me off. Oh You’re So Silent Jens is a compilation after all. It collects songs from three EPs re- leased from 2003-2004. Three of them. There are three colored triangles on the cover. I’m sure you’re on board now. I’m also sure at this point you’re either entirely apathetic or extremely enraged at its simplicity. It was probably his plan all along - to make a dreamy and seemingly symbolic cover we’d ponder deep into, only dash all of our intellectual architecture. A disheveled stack of EPs. It can’t be unseen. It’s the last straw in an album’s worth of wordplay and tomfoolery. It’s the visual equiva- lent of getting trolled. But for a record that dodges gimmicks fairly well, it kinda sucks.