Send "Loney, Dear " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Taking a wide-angle view of the sweeping vistas he's spent years detailing in miniature on his often home-recorded albums, Hall Music-- Swedish softie Emil Svanängen's sixth LP as Loney, Dear-- is his most elaborate work to date. Where there once was little more than voice and guitar and a bit of keyboard, there are church organs and double bass and, at the end of "Calm Down", a gorgeous vibraphone solo, all swirling around Svanängen's high, lonesome vocals. Matching an intimacy of sentiment to a grandiosity of sound, the longing in Svanängen's throat seems palpable and piercing, and the rich orchestral arrangements he drapes over these tunes mostly serve to heighten Svanängen's matters of the heart. Hall Music may be Loney, Dear's most sumptuous-sounding record to date; its tender, plainspoken songs are just as humble and heartfelt as anything Svanängen's done. But their unguarded sentiments sometimes shrink under the weight of their ornate arrangements.Opener "Name" turns "I want your name/ I want your name next to mine" into a mantra of devotion, its music starting small but swelling to match the accumulated emotion. The swarming music heightens Svanängen's lyrics. "D Major" starts out plaintive and pretty but slowly builds to a crescendo of Auto-Tune, while "Loney Blues" gracefully folds in glimmers of sound as it rolls along, lending the song a depth of feeling its semi-muffled vocals only half-express. Svanängen's long been fond of soft starts building to shimmering squalls, but on past albums, its been a flutter of synths and guitar rather than a tangle of brass and strings. When Hall Music's flutter-by orchestrations run up against one of Svanängen's more heart-rending sentiments, there's a multiplying effect, the high drama of Svanängen's devotionals sent skyward. But as often as they bolster Svanängen's pleas, these arrangements seem to crowd the songs themselves from the frame. Despite Hall Music's expanded instrumental palette, Svanängen's songwriting style essentially hasn't changed much since his last LP, 2009's Dear John. Svanängen still prefers to let a few words say what too many might muddle, doubling and tripling his oft-affected voice to send the central message of his songs straight through the chest cavity. But some of Hall Music's grander instrumentations offer a lot for Svanängen's gentle voice to compete against, and occasionally it's just too much; the brassy "Largo" finds Svanängen duking it out with a tuba (and losing), while the slightly sour melody of "Durmoll" proves no match for its stabbing strings....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Emil Svanängen enjoys the bait-and-switch. Like a lot of listeners in the U.S., I first heard his band Loney Dear via their 2007 album Loney, Noir, which abounded with concise, heartfelt indie-pop. Reviewing a song from it for the now-defunct Paper Thin Walls website, I commented that it recalled a certain strain of modestly-scaled yet memorable songwriting — the music made by Holiday in the mid-’90s came to mind. Behind the memorable choruses and uptempo rhythms, however, more complex concepts could be found: a series of shifting narrators, games played with perspective. Svanängen’s an intelligent lyricist and possesses a wry onstage persona, and Loney, Noir made for a fine introduction to his music. That album was only one of four albums that he had released at that point. Since then, two have followed: Dear John in 2009, and now Hall Music. Svanängen’s earlier work also has been made more widely available in the United States, and it’s led to some shifts in how to regard his skills as a songwriter. In late 2010, the composer Nico Muhly wrote an essay placing Loney Dear’s fantastic “Ignorant Boy, Beautiful Girl” into a more compositional context. It provided a different way to look at Loney Dear’s body of work, and suggested new points of reference, new sets of peers. Muhly’s somewhat along for the ride for Hall Music as well: he contributes liner notes, referring to this as “a short album with a wide vision.” Hall Music follows a tour of Sweden in which Svanängen’s music was played by chamber orchestras; this, then, is the most ornate of the album’s he’s made. There are long and almost drone-like sections, such as the one that closes “Young Hearts” in which Svanängen’s voice resounds over sustained notes. (Stylistically, this echoes moments from 2004’s Citadel Band, albeit on a grander scale.) Elsewhere, the dynamic range is greater: “My Heart” begins with a sense of wistful yearning and quickly expands the scope, the low end rumbling and the percussion taking on a baroque touch. That low end — and the dynamic range that it implies — returns with “Durmoll,” the album’s most immediately striking number, which seems to borrow some bombast from Deserter’s Songs-era Mercury Rev....full text |
| Pastemagazine. |
| Emil Svanängen has always been more adept at texture than hooks. Even upbeat songs, like “Airport Surroundings,” from 2009’s Dear John drift into kraut-like hypnosis, the insistence of the rhythm overrunning Svanängen’s hushed croon. This isn’t to discount Svanängen’s work as Loney Dear outright, but rather to acknowledge the crucial difference that makes the frequent comparisons to artists like Jens Lekman ring a bit hollow. This is especially true on Hall Music, Loney Dear’s third properly released full-length (not counting the three albums Svanängen self-released before getting picked up by Sub Pop for Loney Dear’s stateside debut, 2007’s Loney, Noir). Where Dear John hinted at cinematic grandeur and prayer-like melody, Hall Music is a spacious and somber affair. Opener “Name” is tender and earnest, buoyed by a wordless chorus and vocal echoes that recall Arthur Russell’s landmark World of Echo. Like Russell, Svanängen has never shied from a studious approach to pop music. Svanängen might lack the cunning storytelling of a Belle and Sebastian or the orchestral bombast of a Sufjan Stevens. Listening to Loney Dear is an exercise in sound-appreciation. And, with Svanängen rarely leaving his voice’s warm, whispery comfort zone, it’s sometimes a bit of a dreary exercise, too. Songs like “Young Hearts,” a smoldering piano ballad draped in warm reverb, hint at the sort of cavernous ballads Band of Horses have successfully mined. But where Ben Bridwell might’ve let the song swell into a chorus as big as the tides, Svanängen lets his voice drift into the open space his arrangements create. He comes closer on “Drumroll,” but still finds himself muffled by a cavalcade of horns. The rush of sound is welcome, but Svanängen seems to be falling behind it, not leading it. The album ends on a highlight, though. “What Have I Become?” finds Svanängen taking a backseat to vocalist Malin Ståhlberg, whose voice sweeps a range from warm and mellow to piercing. It’s little surprise that the song’s arrangement is Hall Music’s most rhythmically engaged, pushing polyrhythmic percussion against driving keys and gliding streams of brass and strings. “In a land with a thousand seasides/ I never really learned to swim at all,” Ståhlberg sings, before resolving “I really don’t care no more,” as if resignation were its own catharsis. Here, Svanängen doesn’t sacrifice the spacious production of Hall Music’s preceding 10 tracks, but he benefits from the sudden swell in activity. At the end of a spare, politely hushed and flatly paced LP, “What Have I Become?” strikes like an alarm clock—but one worth waking up for....full text |
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