Jenny Lysander
Album: Lighthouse
Label: Beating Drum
Tracks: 4
Website: http:/www.soundcloud.com/jennylysander

Jenny's a 21-year-old singer-songwriter currently living in Stockholm, whose music has an eerie quality of distinctively Nordic other-worldliness inhabiting ostensibly cold yet emotionally rich landscapes of both the mental and geographical climate. That quality is accentuated by the astoundingly complementary production skills of her label boss, British singer-songwriter Piers Faccini, who took Jenny into his remote studio in the south of France to record Lighthouse, her debut CD.

Piers seems to have really adeptly and accurately conveyed Jenny's artistic musical personality through limpid arrangements that gently but firmly cradle Jenny's quiet, delicate, tender vocalising and equally soft-spoken guitar. The very ambience of Jenny's songs is infused with nostalgic melancholy that inhabits a particularly Swedish sensibility, although its crafted nature is deceptive, and can sometimes hide the poetry within her lyrics. Jenny's studies of Chinese philosophy at Stockholm University clearly reflect her own mindset and life visions: one of the EP's songs (Giving Thanks) turns out to have been inspired by watching a video of a Sufi mystic, while the scurrying Dancing On The Edge is reminiscent of Bridget St. John and the spine-tingling centrepiece Mind Me is kindof scary in its depiction of the protagonist's beacon-like status.

I may be mistaken, but the mini-press-release included with the downloaded tracks implies that this EP comes in a kind of art-book package that also contains a short story which she wrote to accompany the songs. This is the eternal problem with having to review from downloads - where us writers, if given no other option, are increasingly denied the chance to appreciate (let alone "sell") the full package, on the production of which so much care will obviously have been lavished.

David Kidman