Review Summary: a fond farewell to a friend
On March 15th of this year, Jens Lekman announced that he would be discontinuing his defining album
Night Falls Over Kortedala, a few months short of the record’s fifteenth birthday. The press release from label Secretly Canadian put the dog to sleep quickly and mercifully: “Jens Lekman's
Night Falls Over Kortedala is leaving this life and heading into eternity.”
The cause of death was later confirmed to be legal conflicts surrounding the numerous samples that make up
Kortedala’s skeleton; Lekman recently remedied the situation by re-releasing the album, re-recorded, distressingly sample-free and far inferior, with a handful of bonus tracks stapled to it (see
The Linden Trees are Still in Blossom, if you must). The re-release is far from the sendoff that a mammoth like
Kortedala deserves, but if it gives us an opportunity to revisit Lekman’s second album some near-15 years later, all the better for it.
So, a revisitation it is. It’s always been interesting to me that Lekman followed up
Kortedala with an explicit and heavy-handed (but quite good!) breakup album in
I Know What Love Isn’t, because
Kortedala treads much of the same territory in a more three-dimensional manner. It must be noted that
Kortedala, with its dramatic musings on love and love lost, is tremendously saccharine, to the point that it will be an understandable barrier to entry for many. Without being in the proper headspace, the unabashedly goofy twee-pop of a song like “A Postcard to Nina” can be irritating at best and an album-stopper at worst. This is a man who has unironically used words in his songs like “coochie-coo” and “belly"; I don’t begrudge anyone their decision to turn tail.
But for those with stronger stomachs for the sort of lovelorn, croony chamber pop at which Lekman excels, there’s gold to be found here. There's also much more than meets the eye:
Kortedala is an often overwhelmingly sad album written by a man who was, at least at one point, often overwhelmingly sad. Four years before this album’s release, on the also-recently-re-released “Maple Leaves”, Lekman was battling severe depression while struggling with the day-to-day banalities of a job he saw as menial (selling telephones) and asking God for even a momentary reprieve from his mental torment. That pain hasn’t gone anywhere on
Kortedala - it’s just hidden better, couched behind the spritely orchestral risings-and-fallings that make up a good portion of the album. “The Opposite of Hallelujah” is probably the most logical example here, as a bright, punchy piano melody complements a song that is plainly about trying and failing to communicate with a loved one through the throes of depression (“you don’t know cause it just passes right through you / you don’t know what I’m going through”). Quietly, perhaps the most affecting is “If I Could Cry (It Would Feel Like This)”, a cheeky ode to anhedonia - a gorgeous orchestral arrangement dedicated to sorrow and pain, preferable alternatives to the crushing flatline of mental illness.
But to paint
Kortedala as a downer would be to sell it short. One could certainly read a song like closer “Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo” as a story of loneliness and shattered dreams (count yours truly among that bunch), but it’s also easy enough to hear the syrupy pop perfection of the chorus and call it a day. There are moments of transcendental joy on here, as blissful and powerful as pop music gets - the ending of “Kanske är jag kär i dig”, for one, or the soaring chorus of Spotify favorite “Your Arms Around Me”. In its most gripping moments it effectively tackles both extremes, ruminating on days gone by with both joy and melancholy (see the opening duo, famously featuring a first-team Emotional Boy Gut Punch in “I see myself on my deathbed saying “‘I wish I would have loved less.’” My young heart still aches! Where are you going?).
This, I think, is where
Kortedala is at its most magical, not just in its examination of its creator’s ghosts, but in its acceptance of them. The psychological concept of “lost possible selves” - an unnecessarily fancy name for a very basic idea - refers to mental creations of ideal versions of one’s self, no longer achievable due to certain events or decisions in the past. Lekman is constantly conjuring and dissecting his lost possible selves on
Kortedala: “Friday Night” ends the album with a daydream of an intangible and unreachable future, and Lekman very literally confronts a personification of his “old life” on “Sipping On the Sweet Nectar”. But his approach is contrary to the popular wisdom on how to banish these memories - rather than ignoring them entirely, on “Sweet Nectar”, Lekman indulges. “I take a sip … I let it wet my lips.” Only then does he move on.
Last year, Lekman posted something to a similar effect on his website: “I immediately become skeptical when people talk about reinventing themselves,” he wrote. “[T]here’s nothing wrong with dipping your toes in some new waters once in a while. But too often I think we forget that if we change we'll never know what it was like to not have changed.” It feels right to revisit this sentiment when bidding goodbye to
Kortedala. As life continues to hurtle us headfirst into the future, as lawyers write each other fancy demand letters regarding the use of uncredited samples on a 15-year-old album, as more polished versions of Lekman’s old material start popping up on A Streaming Service Near You, it seems only proper to indulge instead of moving on with the rest of the world, if only for a moment.
That’s when the feeling hits.
