A bipartite reaction to Love Is All’s A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night

It’s yet another of our extended reviews, this time around focusing on Love Is All’s second long-player. We find out the opinions of two our writers, on this occasions – and come up with a mostly resounding ‘affirmative’.

Joseph Rowan says:
Like The Zutons, Love Is All have a secret weapon, in the shape of a saxophone. Unlike The Zutons, however, the saxophone isn’t their sole redeeming feature. New saxophonist Åke Strömer squeals away pleasingly in the manner of X-Ray Spex on the more energetic tracks, but he doesn’t provide the sole additions to the band’s musical palette. The glockenspiel, something of an indie-pop regular, is used to great effect on ‘Last Choice’ and an understated harmonica line really adds to the downbeat feel of ‘More Uncertain Future’.

Of course the more traditional-sounding songs are still present, the slices of frantic garage-pop in the manner of great earlier singles like ‘Busy Doing Nothing’. But, bizarrely, some of these are the least satisfactory songs on the album. Breakneck opener ‘New Beginning’ does everything right: it keeps up a tremendous pace for its whole duration and is simultaneously catchy and shambolic. The guitars are loud and energetic and Josephine Olausson’s voice, always on the cusp of being in tune, is a remarkable force in itself.

Similarly, closing track ‘19 Floors’, with its buzzing keyboards and Sonic Youth aping instrumental jam is a great end to the album. But between these fantastic bookends lie a number of somewhat unremarkable songs that definitely bring the word “filler” to mind. The title track, ‘Boat Song’ and ‘Give It Back’, to name the three worst examples, have all the right ingredients but lack much in a way of direction as they stagger from riff to riff in the hope of stumbling across something memorable. If you’re not going to innovate in a genre that’s admittedly somewhat stagnant then you’d better be damned sure you’ve got some killer hooks, and a lot of middle tracks on the album are noticeably lacking.

Fortunately, the disappointing tracks on the album are not so frequent as to overshadow its real highlights. These are where, surprisingly, the band drops the tempo somewhat and allows some of their older influences to shine through – not just the 80s indiepoppers of the C86 variety, but reaching back earlier to 60s soul and doo-wop groups. ‘Giants Fall’ owes a huge debt to fellow Phil Spector fans The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Just Like Honey’, but it’s a refreshing change of pace and ‘Cats’ features a wonderfully harmonised chorus. In general the vocal interplay between Olausson and guitarist Nicholaus Sparding is very effective, making the band sound like a less insubstantial Alphabeat. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in possible album highlight ‘More Uncertain Future’, a classic two-viewpoint break-up song, somewhat reminiscent in feel to The Postal Service’s ‘Nothing Better’.

It is these tracks, ultimately, that showcase an interesting direction in which Love Is All could evolve on future albums. Having said that they are still capable of writing the kind of chaotic-yet-charming indie-pop that they became known for, although one suspects how much longer they can continue to get fresh material out of that particular avenue. A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night is hardly genre-defining but it certainly suggests that Love Is All are a band who still have something interesting to say.

Does Greg Salter agree?
While it’s hard being single, it’s slightly less hard being single if you’re an indie music fan; you’ve got band after band ready to soundtrack your loneliness, pain and failed attempts at finding ‘the one’ at indie discos and second-hand bookshops. The Smiths, The Cure, and Belle and Sebastian all knew how to fuse melancholy with irresistible pop songs, and more recently Los Campesinos! have forged raucous, hooky, odd little songs out of the neuroses and growing pains that come with being young.

Think of Gothenburg’s Love Is All, and particularly the lyrics of frontwoman Jospehine Olausson, as playing to a similar audience, though one a few years older and a little wiser, though no less neurotic. Olausson casts her eye of the kingdom of singledom, from her viewpoint slap bang in the middle of it, and it is her anecdotes, ruminations and wry observations that form the, very human, heart of Love Is All’s music, her childlike voice a little more prominent in the mess of jerky rhythms than on 2005’s Nine Times That Same Song.

A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night continues, in terms of sound at least, where their much-lauded debut left off. ‘New Beginning’ roars out of the blocks to kick off the album, with the rhythm section rumbling along at a frantic pace and the now familiar, to Love Is All fans, sax squalling alongside. Olausson, all credit to her, keeps up, this ball of energy in amongst the noise, looking for the new beginning of the title but finding herself ‘in a taxi going home/Far too early on my own’. ‘Give It Back’, meanwhile, appropriately find Olausson regretting wasted time over angular, machine gun-precision guitars at top speed; ‘Forget I ever mentioned my heart’, she sings, as the song pauses briefly before jettisoning off once again to its close.

It’s this combination of Olausson’s gallows humour and her band’s enthusiastic backing and shouted backing vocals which makes the best tracks here difficult to resist. ‘Last Choice’ finds Olausson alone at the end of a party, watching everyone else pairing up and quickly seeking out someone else; ‘I’m not your kind and you’re not mine/But for tonight you’ll have to do just fine’ looks sad written down but they sing the words so gleefully, tongue firmly in cheek, that it’s difficult to notice.

A bit of refreshing honesty is the order of the day, then. Love Is All aren’t pushing any myths; laughing in the face of movie romance, having their dreams unfulfilled by wishing wells, and lying awake in an empty bed, long into the night. And they’re not afraid to vary the pace, either; ‘A More Uncertain Future’ in particular works well, and sounds like the prettiest break-up ever. Unafraid to either speak from the heart or stick a sax solo in the middle of a song, Love Is All are a charming proposition, their intelligence and humour providing an antidote to all overblown, over-serious bloke-rock between here and Sweden.