Track Listing

1. Tram #7 To Heaven
2. Happy Birthday Dear Friend Lisa
3. Do You Remember The Riots
4. Are You The Light (By Which I Travel Into This And That)
5. If You Ever Need A Stranger (To Sing At Your Wedding)
6. Silvia
7. Cold Swedish Winter
8. Julie
9. Psychogirl
10. When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog
11. Higher Power

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79593 in Music
• Released on: 2004-09-20
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .22 pounds

Customer Reviews

Leftfield singer/songwriter
Jens Lekman peers quizzically out from the CD cover. He looks like he's five going on twenty-five, dressed in a fifties-style bobbly jumper and with tousled fifties hair. Yikes, is this the face of that deep, knowing voice? Who'd have believed it? Suddenly I think Jens is not so artless as he looks. He probably messed up his own hair before the photo-shoot to get the right vulnerable Jeff Buckley-look. (I was going to say Stig Dagerman, but nobody outside Sweden would know what on Earth I'm talking about.)

But let's leave the subject of hair, and move on to music. And very lovely music it is! Offbeat lyrics are set to sweeping, melodious arrangements, where all sorts of different instruments pop up: "You Are The Light Through Which I Travel" starts off with a Dallas-like fanfare, "Do You Remember The Riots?" is set against a hesitant violin.

There's something very cinematic about these songs, if you listen to the lyrics. He sings of a TV helicopter filming him and his girlfriend during the EU summit riots in Gothenburg - there he is on the screen, "red in the face like a lobster". Or else he croons about getting arrested for love and using his one phone call to dedicate a song to his girlfriend on the radio. Genius ideas! And who can blame him if he seems a bit infatuated with his own whimsy? Maybe Jens' trick is to be dead serious while singing OTT lines like "all the psycho-girls, why do they fall for me?" It's funny, it's sad, it's driving me nuts, I have to go and stalk Jens a little bit.

Try it if you like Jonathan Richman, Bright Eyes, Rupert Wainwright, Serge Gainsbourg.