Pelle Carlberg’s “The Lilac Time” - Sappy review to follow.
“I don’t like the sort of person that I turn into/Grumpy, selfish and inpatient, but only with you”.  That beautiful first set of lines begins the last track of Pelle Carlberg’s “The Lilac Time”, “Tired of Being PC”, and encapsulates what’s so great about Pelle: introspection within the framework of the pop song.  He makes true “pop” music, in the sense that he unabashedly goes about trying to craft a perfect verse-chorus-verse song.  He has a folk mentality in his songwriting, which easily could be compared to Elliott Smith if Elliott’s music hadn’t been so jaw-droppingly depressing or Josh Ritter if Josh was 200 times more poppy.  This is Pelle’s third solo album, and, thankfully, he hasn’t gone into an obnoxious, self-indulgent (read: Radiohead-esque) electronic “experimentation” phase.  Instead, he’s producing brilliant, sweet, perfect pop songs.

The album’s highlights include “Animal Lovers”, with a great line about how people prefer animals over other people (”Do people like animals because they don’t talk back?”), “Nicknames”, and “Fly Me to the Moon”, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is a great Ryanair revenge song.  Pelle has the world’s dirtiest, most distorted guitar track on “51,3″, which mocks Facebook quizzes, but is also self-deprecating at the same time.  And there is also a great story about not changing the oil in a car on “Metal to Metal”.  His songs are always clever and interesting.  What makes his music so great is the contrast of brilliant songwriting/lyricism with simple guitar production (there are no over-the-top solos, no grandiose production, no unnecessary flairs).

Now, there are a few things about the album that I don’t necessarily like.  I think the song “Whisper” seems a bit out of place, and, while I do listen to it, I sometimes find myself skipping it when it comes up.  And the song “Stockholm v. Paris” is all of 1:13, which, if combined with the 1:30 of silence at the end of “Tired of Being PC”, would cut the album by almost 3 minutes.  Why, that’s the perfect amount of time for another song.

While I prefer his other two solo albums to this one, The Lilac Time is still a great album.  Not to mention that his output is quite prolific, since this is his third album since 2005.  (I remember seeing a BadlyDrawnBoy show back in 2003 and he said that if an artist doesn’t produce an album a year, then he’s just lazy–he has since released 2 albums in the five years since I saw him).  I suppose I should be grateful that I now have three Pelle albums that I can throw on random on my iPod.  Here’s hoping he breaks out another one for 2009.

The whole album is available for listening over at Last.FM.

Pelle Carlberg: http://pellecarlberg.se/