Dekadens

Yes I'm one of those people curious to know why after 3 albums Lifelover decided to record an EP of 7 short songs. I've got the actual EP which has quite lavish packaging with a booklet that includes lyrics to all the songs and a set of carefully staged photographs of scenes of urban desolation, loneliness, squalor and the back cover of one previous Lifelover album. (Who's doing lines of coke over a picture of a nude woman with streams of blood running down her thighs?) At the risk of being accused of presuming to know more than the Lifelover men do about their music, I am guessing that Lifelover may be transitioning into a new phase in their career, especially as they have a live drummer who also contributes to the songwriting. The music on this mini-album ("Dekadens" is half the length of previous albums) is very different from what I've got used to from these guys: it's much more urgent, even desperate in parts, and the guys' attitude seems more hardened and crazed. The singing is much more on the edge as if vocalist Kim Carlsson aka ( ) actually lives the life and experiences he's singing about (and he may do for all I know) and they've affected him more deeply than even he imagined. The style of music is unsettled though there's a general tendency for the musicians to go in a tough, near-thrashy metal direction: in the space of 26 minutes we jump from black metal / post-rock fusion ("Luguber Framtid") to clean black metal complete with near-grim vocals, banshee screaming and a frosty atmosphere ("Major Fuck Off"), some Gothic-sounding urban blues with jangly piano ("Androider"), moody post-rock with field recordings and voice samples ("Visdomsord") and a mixture of all of these in the schizophrenic mini-drama "Destination: Ingenstans" which has ( ) acting out his own tortured Private Idaho.

No doubt about it, ( )'s singing is the best thing here: no matter what genre or combination of genres the band plunges into, this guy is more than capable of singing in the style appropriate for that music - he seems to relish it and is absorbed completely in the style's demands with feeling and zest. Most of the music is tight and super-efficient so that each song, no matter how short it is (and some can be very short), is a complete self-contained unit and none of them sounds unfinished. Every moment is made to count and a couple of middle of tracks "Lethargy" and "Androider" are very compact though the music may vary wildly and the moods go from one extreme to the next.

It's possible that listeners might find this disc very rushed with some songs being so compact in what they include that they become a "blink-and-you'll-miss-'em" blur in their impact on the listener. The mix of genres, sometimes within the one song with new things happening right up to or near the end, may suggest the band can't make up its collective mind about where it's going or what it's doing. There's the danger that listeners might think less of the band's commitment to the music and how seriously it should be taken if the musicians appear to be experimenting or playing with their style just for the heck of it and not because the subject matter demands it. There is a definite unity in the EP but some people may get more out of it if they listen to individual songs first and get used to them rather than try to listen to the whole disc all the way through. The EP does lend itself as a collection of independent songs on one level and as a collection of related songs with inter-related themes on a different level.

Gah, it's just a short recording and I managed to write as much as I would for an 80-minute set. This is a Lifelover that has distilled and condensed the range of what the band is capable of and has done so far into a compact package that for the band is direct and straightforward. It could be said though that maybe "Dekadens" is too condensed and that some songs need to be stretched out a bit more, made a little longer, to breathe easier and allow passages of different musical styles to integrate and flow into each other better.