MANCHESTER : Hey! Manchester @ The Ruby Lounge

Wednesday 19th September, 2012

7:30pm

Event information

We’re delighted to be promoting a show for Jens Lekman, the reason we started Hey! Manchester.

Jens Lekman will release a new album, I Know What Love Isn’t, on 3 September on Secretly Canadian. The album is his first full length in five years, following the critically acclaimed Night Falls Over Kortedala. The opening track sets the stage for what’s to come: a simple melody picked out on an echoey upright piano, like a disused one you might find in a schoolroom or church. The tune, Every Little Hair Knows Your Name, is bittersweet but gentle, with a sustain that fades into the acoustic guitar and twinkling flourish of chimes on Erica America, the album’s first single.

From there the album expands, using an economical palette of sounds. I Know What Love Isn’t has strings but not a string section, an upright piano, not grand, a single saxophone, gracenotes from a flute, a lot of tambourine. Combined in exact proportions with Lekman’s melancholy abstract lyrics, the songs evoke the Brill Building sound, something Steve Rosen (writing for Crawdaddy) calls ‘an ambitious creative approach. Their sound was adventurous and full of surprisingly subtle coloration. There wasn’t a fear that delicacy could be interpreted as a loss of edge. Delicacy was part of the edge.’

This combination of soft-as-sharp can be found throughout I Know What Love Isn’t. A sprightly piano line on Become Someone Else’s backs the sentiment of not becoming ‘like the sinking rock tied to the leg of a person’. I Want A Pair Of Cowboy Boots pairs a single acoustic guitar and piano with the warmest smoothest vocal interplay and a cutting request for boots that walk ‘anywhere but back to you’. Images of everyday life follow a bouncy pop tune on The World Moves On; lying on the floor with a bag of frozen peas; feeding possums in the park; but also serve to illustrate how these ordinary things continue to happen in the face of heartbreak. ‘The world just shrugs it’s shoulders and keeps going, it just moves on in all it’s sadness and glory.’ The title track brings us the story of a sham marriage that feels realer for its honesty, ‘a relationship that doesn’t lie about its intentions and shit’.

Lekman is a storyteller of the highest calibre, letting his delicate vignettes unfold to show the wonder that lies in the mundane. That’s what I Know What Love Isn’t… is. A collection of songs that grew to a story that had to be told. A story that is not new, but essentially human. The story of the grey areas of love that you have to excavate and explore, using the method of exclusion, to find out what love is.

http://www.jenslekman.com/
http://www.heymanchester.com/

34 High Street
Manchester
M4 1QB

www.heymanchester.com