Brittsommar
Album: The Machine Stops
Label: Lucky Duck Music
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.brittsommar.tumblr.com

US/Swedish combo Brittsommar appear to be the vehicle for, if not the brainchild of, the obscure Sawyer L. Gebauer, about whom it's proved hard to find anything useful. Assuming that he's the singer on this, Brittsommar's second album, then it's difficult to resist hearing his uncompromising delivery as a kind of halfway-house-cum-Heartbreak-Hotel stance that's poised less than comfortably between Elvis croon, Jim Morrison or Nick Cave gloom and almost-yawn. It both jars with and very strangely concords with the instrumental backdrops, which are sparse and often distinctly sinister in a sometimes creepy indie-folk-gothic manner.

Sawyer's songs, written during travels in the American midwest apparently, tend to sketch stories of lost letters never found, and immerse the listener in their evocative world at the same time as spurring on a desire to understand the rather cryptic lyrics. The press release catalogues these as follows: "goodbyes from prisoner to daughter. A lesson from a French soldier to his nurse during WW1. A parent's confession whose child was a murderer." It goes on to state that "words are stone". But even the most straightforwardly rendered song, Godspeed, doesn't yield up its secrets easily. In this context, it would've been good to have the lyrics printed somewhere, since the basic style of the vocal delivery seems a touch at odds with the lyrics' musical depiction. The instrumentation jars too at times (and yet deliberately so, I suspect - and mightily effectively, I feel), with fevered glistening electric guitars burning through the bowed and strummed acoustic textures that can set the ear's teeth on edge.

For some reason this record's powerful atmospherics don't always quite convince, though, and it's hard to know what to make of all this in the end, but at the close of the disc's 37 minutes one's left with the impression that there are more secrets yet to be revealed - albeit not necessarily with any number of subsequent playthroughs. In fact, the determinedly elusive nature of The Machine Stops reminds me of the turn-away-and-it's-not-even-there aspect of the notorious Schrödinger's Cat conundrum.

David Kidman