Secretely Canadian
Jens Lekman : When I said I wanted to be your dog (S,2004)°° (ok)
What I noticed immediately was a warm young voice, nice arrangements and a good portion of gentleness and friendliness. After the song “Tram number 7 to heaven”, a child like song, I thought the textual talent would be a bit more as from an adult. But the next two tracks have an obvious nursery rhyme kind of poetry. The textual part is in simple English (Jens is Swedish). The vision behind it is from a not long ago graduated youngster with big portion of interest in girls. Jens looks into the camera with the attractive boy-look in his eyes, for girls who like boys who are not completely grown up. In this context, while some of these boys still look for the same protection in a girl as with a mother, they look mostly less harmful to them. But when it comes to a balanced responsible communication, these boys have no experience or awareness yet or nothing to fall back on, so they keep looking a bit longer to feel at least the tension of young purity. The songs are well presented and attractive. Here and there we hear nice backing female vocals, similar like in Cohens work. There are some orchestrations here, which I found most successful on “Happy Birtday, dear friend Lisa”. A nice album. I just hope Jens' vision will grow with his age. The musical form is already attractive.
PS. A much better album covering the maturing progress from a child's view growing into adultery is David Bowie's first, self titled album from 1967.
