Jens Lekman doesn’t play aloof, “cool,” detached music. Jens believes in love and wind chimes and string sections, and he puts them all out there. His openness is couched in keen, charming observations that leave you more than willing to share a sunny day with him. This is summer time music. Blending his cuddly baritone with huge ’70s pop samples, Lekman captures the innocence and humor of being young, optimistic and slightly too hot for comfort.
And man, I just want to talk about how great his lyrics are. In “The Opposite of Hallelujah,” Jens takes his sister to the beach hoping to use various sea objects as metaphors for his loneliness but, despite his best efforts, the sea does not cooperate. “Picked up a seashell to illustrate my homelessness/ but a crab crawled out of it making it useless”
Or in “A Postcard to Nina,” Jens pretends to be the boyfriend of a lesbian friend to fool her father and after an awkward dinner, the father ends up really liking him. Jens feels guilty when the father e-mails him family updates for months. Jens can only bear to send him “out of office auto-replies.”
These might sound like really bad episodes of Threes Company, but Mr. Lekman’s genius is in noticing the absurd in contemporary sulking: How the Internet inflates minuscule tragedies and makes miscommunication that much more public and embarrassing. This focus is why his retro sampling works: Each song is a collage of snippets drawn from the music that surrounds us everyday—bits of disco collide with ukulele and ’80′s film soundtracks just like a wandering day with your ipod while Streets of Fire bittorrents back home.
Jens Lekman plays the Crocodile on Thurs June 4th and Fri June 5th
