Sondre Lerche: Two Way Monologue : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Norway's Sondre Lerche possesses a boyish yet accomplished voice that's every bit as expressive as his tunes. He's only twenty-one and looks even younger, but this thinking person's pop star writes ornate, Sunday-morning melodies that suggest a composer twice his age, and his soft, urbane tenor rises to the challenge. Recalling an early David Bowie minus all the affectations, Lerche croons in clear, Anglo-accented English, shifting between reedy low notes and a swooning falsetto of casual, sensual grace.

His second album, Two Way Monologue, showcases those sweet melodies even more effectively than his debut, 2002's Faces Down. Recorded in his hometown of Bergen, Norway, its uncluttered arrangements assimilate decades of chamber pop, folk and even jazz. Strings, horns, woodwinds, various keyboards and guitars swirl around, evoking studio craftsmen from the Beach Boys to Steely Dan to Prefab Sprout. Lamenting as a pedal steel guitar cries through "Stupid Memory," the singer proves he's already become a master of lighthearted melancholy, singing as if smiling through his heart's mishaps. Lerche's well-scripted self-consciousness seems effortless, because he and his backup musicians don't rock: They swing.

His weakness is his words. Lerche clearly puts effort into his poetry, but the results are often vague, and at worst they suggest a nonsensical translation of what might have been eloquent in the singer's native tongue. Even Lerche's emotive singing can't save the lyrical train wreck that is "Track You Down": "When tears are pretzels pouring down/ Each time the sweetness is returning/At times when you appreciate that you survived." Somebody needs to find this budding Burt Bacharach his own Hal David, or at least a better English teacher.

BARRY WALTERS
(RS 944, March 18, 2004)