Albums of 2008: #1

Hello Saferide - More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide



It's been a strong year for albums all round and the most difficult year that I can remember to decide what should top this list. There was almost nothing at all between two albums that stand head and shoulders above everything else released in the past few years. I've had a few changes of heart but in the end had to make a personal choice and go for the one that, to invert a quote from #4, told me lots about my life, and which said it in endlessly charming and clever and insightful ways. It’s also a second successive Swedish winner, if anyone is keeping score.

Annika Norlin's 2005 debut Introducing Hello Saferide demonstrated a talent for writing songs laced with self-effacing wit and the telling small details of everyday life, all wrapped in sunny lo-fi indie pop. The wit and talent remains, but musically its follow up was enough of a change of direction for her to feel the need to issue advance warning that the album 'features no hand claps and hardly any acoustic guitars'.

As it turns out, the initially disconcerting move to a fuller sound works wonderfully. If anything it suits Norlin’s slightly husky voice better and while the songs still make songwriting sound the easiest thing in the world they crucially now have the musical heft to back up their emotional weight when required. Take “X Telling Me About the Loss of Something Dear, at Age 16”, a regretful tale of lost virginity that unflinchingly sets out the facts before a single soft ‘I felt sad and I didn’t know why’ brings out the emotions that have been seeping through between the lines. It’s even more powerful for its twanging pedal steel backing, and the way that the enveloping choral ‘ahh’s raise tempo to an almost cruel ‘ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah’, like an aural version of the experience burned into memory. It also, incidentally, now possesses the most amusingly inappropriate video of the year.

Alongside the musical developments, Annika now sounds remarkably self-assured. She still makes no secret of her issues, with “Travelling With HS” ruefully admitting that she prefers spending time with herself than other people, but she sounds like someone who has made peace with them, who is in a position to analyse and make humour from the unhealthier desires rather than give into them.

And so she is in a position to make magic out of the ordinary. Nothing that dramatic as such ever happens in Hello Saferide songs (unless it’s imagined like her non-existent daughter’s multitude of achievements in “Anna”) but, you know, nothing that dramatic really happened in my life this year either, and it doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel extremes of emotion at times.

Nothing gave me the same shiver of recognition as the line “People give me work and money/They depend on me now/If they only knew how thin the ice they walk on is’ from “Parenting Never Ends”, a beautifully vulnerable song about the pains of growing up and the not-so-hidden desire to give it all up and retreat into childhood (or earlier). I might not yet be able to personally relate to “Overall”’s satire of parents worried about the effect the tiniest failure to follow best practice might have on their children, but it rings deliciously true. Then there’s the moment in the Bonnie and Clyde fantasies of the bored “Middle Class” where Annika plots to steal a car before noting ‘I’ll probably feel bad for not taking the train’.

“Arjeplog” boils down love and the trials of domestic life to its essentials ‘The obstacles we build for ourselves, my love/Creating decisions to make, my love/When really it could be this easy/You and me and house and food’ before casting off the worries with a smile as its escapist string-swept chorus takes off beyond mere words. ‘The wind in the trees are like shhhww, shhhww/And the trains that pass by are like chkachk-chkachk’ it goes, and ‘Our feet in the snow are like shp-shp-shp/And the choir in my chest is like oh-oh-ohhh-oh’. Then comes the kicker – ‘And the Stockholm insecurity is like I don’t exist’. It’s one of the most uplifting things I’ve ever heard.

The first signs of how much I was going to love the album actually came practically two years before its release, when I saw her at Eurosonic and noted the high quality of new stuff, especially one about how people are like songs, especially loving how it ingeniously phrased its admiration through the words ‘You’re the only one I’ve met who’s God Only Knows’. That song is now opening standout “I Wonder Who is Like This One” and sounds even better, with a mythic quality in its hushed electric progression that recalls a certain recently popular Jeff Buckley interpretation. There are layers of depth to even its apparently throwaway lines, too – it only recently dawned that not only is ‘Me, I’m like Can’t Get You Out of My Head’/Annoying at first but I’ll make you want to dance’ a funny line, but the whole thing is indeed about someone that she can’t get out of her head!

I sincerely hope that this album will get picked up and released properly in the UK (especially given the current exchange rate for buying from Sweden, ouch) because not only is it massively deserving of a wider audience but there really should be no barrier to it – aside from an occasional local reference and having to look up Sancho Panza to fully get the song of the same name this should be universal stuff. Songwriting this good usually is.