Susanne Sundfør - "Ten Love Songs"

all the beats and organs are gone aren't they

not if by beats and organs you mean piano and pedal steel!

anyway I'm a miserable prick so of course I love this but it's not gonna be another ILX zeitgeist crasher

i'm all over the record.

I'm over the record.

i don't like much of the first half, but i love the second half

i really like the last half of 'the sound of war'

and the first half

Really beautiful album. Perhaps not every melody and song is stellar but it's a very high bar she's setting. So confident in the material. Can't wait to hear the new stuff in Glasgow.

And where's Lex?

So intrigued by the lyrical content too. What's been going on for her since the last album...

Jealous of you guys who have the album. In the meantime I'll have to make do with this recording on a mountaintop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OTGgmXMfs0

The live vocals on the last third..

wow, that live performance of Undercover blew me away. This song captures the lovesick feeling so perfectly

more on youtube: about the location and trek (includes a bit of The Brothel):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mW-MDmZAvc

and The Sound Of War:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqnpuhHs7kQ

Jealous of you guys who have the album. In the meantime I'll have to make do with this recording on a mountaintop

📹

That's a beautiful performance. Lyrics of love lost. Which seems to be the theme of the album imo.

Thanks for those YT links StanM. Really great stuff.

I'm obsessed with Music For People In Trouble right now. It's pretty much the perfect follow-up for me. It's going to be a great autumn soundtrack.

On non stop repeat for me

this is.....quite good. REALLY reminding me of Weyes Blood (and not just coz she just released a single) so if you didn't hear her album from last year then hear it, it's amazing. 'the golden age' is p much a Weyes Blood song

who's the actor sampled btw? tt reckons ben whishaw

this isn't like Ten Love Songs where it's immediately lovable and I don't see this ending up an all-time favourite, but it is one of the best albums I've heard in a long time. The last two minutes of Undercover is an incredible performance.

This is very different but very good. The sound of it is amazing.

Stark.

Love it.

I've definitely come around on this now that I've heard the previously released tracks in context. The pedal steel is used to haunting effect.

these are powerful songs, though I miss the gothic majesty of Ten Love Songs

No one can convince me that if Adele cut "Undercover" it wouldn't be massive.

feel like it would be completely redundant TBH

I listened to this last night and it's grown on me a little bit. This is definitely one of those records that only locks in when you're in the mood for it.

what Sundfor does as a vocalist, especially on songs like "Undercover", is take the idea of a particular type of heartbreak - the mix of loneliness and patheticness that feels so private and tortured and insular - and blow it up to seem like the end of the world, but in a way that seems sincere rather than performed. I wouldn't say she avoids melodrama - I think that's key to the idea of her as a performer - but rather her tendencies towards melodrama are convincingly authentic.

So in the hands of eg Adele you can imagine it being sung well (probably better, technically) and it being a great performance, but not anywhere near as believable a statement. I don't necessarily believe authenticity alone can make for better music, but working in this particular style, it requires a degree of earnestness that can only come from full committment to it, and you can hear that in both this album's slide guitar and sample usage, or Ten Love Songs' willingness to embrace the kitsch of italo-disco and the grandiose string arrangements.

my first experience of really loving pop music was Shakespeare's Sister "Stay" which is basically a Twilight fan fiction turned into a synth power ballad but performed with disarming conviction, and I think we're in similar territory here - whether its intentional or not I think Sundfor as a artist really gets the idea of low culture as a valid means of expression to create high art (low/high used in terms of critical canon hierarchies)

Susanne has announced her biggest ever London show at Shepherds Bush Empire on March 1st 2018. Pre-sale tickets: https://t.co/G90Ls3H2AZ pic.twitter.com/8XoIT20KRe

— Susanne Sundfør (@susannesundfor) September 11, 2017

This is really, really powerful stuff. Makes sense that after such a grand, boundless album she'd do something smaller and more confined.

Cool portrait.
I have to say Sunder is one of these individuals, a la Gaga, who no matter how many pictures I see of them, I can never really get what they look like (and who I would never recognise on the street)

err Sundfør obviously

The 'music for people in trouble' track just had me going a bit mad trying to work out what I thought it was going to be a cover of (thankfully not as I think it's one of the worst songs ever, Ultra Nate 'free')
Or is it?

When the acoustic guitar first appeared in the title track, I thought it was going to turn into Erica America by Jens Lekman. It sounds exactly like the intro.

yeah, that too!

http://thequietus.com/articles/22874-heading-to-the-west-coast-susanne-sundfr-s-13-favourite-albums

I like this:

With the titles of my two last albums - 10 Love Songs and Music For People in Trouble - I wanted them to be a bit stupid. I'm drawn to that kind of art where you're told: "This is what it is.” And then you have to figure out yourself the depth of it, instead of having a very extravagant and deep title and trying to work out what it's about.

ok hang on THE CORRS?

hahahaha

Fair play to her. They wrote some lovely melodies. It's just that Jim's a spacecake.

man this record is gorgeous. great quietus list too

i like that she included for the roses bc that's what "bedtime story" puts me in the mind of

I've gone from not thinking a lot to this record to thinking it's amazing over a few listens. A grower, and not to be written off because it's nothing like the previous record.

could be that i'm just very tired at work today but "mountaineers" made me cry at my desk

I said this before but the climax of that song is completely unreal

Ten Love Songs completely passed me by, still not heard it, as I've got my hands full with this new album, which is fantastic. Just in time, too.

I love that she loves Seventh Tree. I totally agree with her take on it.

i like that she included /for the roses/ bc that's what "bedtime story" puts me in the mind of

Ditto pink moon. Her guitar playing on the title track reminds me of -horn-