put lerche and costello in the fishtank

Music February 19th, 2009

The blue trenchcoat is, in many ways, like a professional basketball franchise: we take an extended hiatus for the All-Star weekend, we emphasize height above many other qualities, and we’d be willing to trade most of our staff for Amare Stoudemire and two first-round draft picks. 

But trade talks fell apart, and so, in lieu of a young center/forward who needs to work on his defense, you get this: 

I’d always been somewhat lukewarm on Sondre Lerche - it’s hard to like a guy who’s that pretty, for one thing - until I heard The Duper Sessions. This one caught me by surprise for a number of reasons: foremost among them, he downshifts from guitar-wielding young Norwegian indie popster into jazz quartet leader. Somehow he makes it seem like this is what he was always meant to do. I feel for the poor record company; there must have been some quiet sobbing going on when their budding star told them he was going jazz/vocal for his breakout moment. But they have national health care, they don’t need profits. And they couldn’t argue with the quality. 

The Duper Sessions finds Lerche in the company of the Faces Down Quartet, (Erik, Morten, Ole, and Kato, the last three superb names for your next pets) all of them having some swinging fun in the studio. It’s straight-up, elegant jazz/vocal, Chet Baker style.

The other shock on the record is that, with the exception of “Night and Day” and “Human Hands”, these are all originals; they just happen to sound like jazz standards. Good as the originals are, the one that’s going up here is his cover of Elvis Costello’s “Human Hands”. If I were the curator behind the Fishtank series - that ongoing experiment by the Konkurrent label which places a pair of oddball indie musicians in the studio together, and always results in, at least, a nice-looking album - I would be shouldering heaven and earth to get Costello and Lerche together. Strangely enough, I seem to have nothing to do with the Fishtank series. I keep showing up, and they keep saying “You don’t work here.” It’s distressing.
      
Anyway: The Duper Sessions. Esoteric music with universal appeal, which could almost be the blue trenchcoat motto: but ‘everyone’s a winner’ is basically the same thing. 
 

 

 

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