Album Review: Oh, Laura - A Song Inside My Head, A Demon in My Bed
August 11th 2008 01:42
There are times when you randomly catch a fragment of a song, or chance upon a lingering melody which resonates within your being long after the moment has passed. A guitar line that plays itself over and over. A melancholic vocal which continues to sing inside your head. On some occasions, you may endeavour to uncover the artist in question but on the whole it remains just another one of those missed music moments which are inexorably consigned to the past.
Most of you have probably heard Oh, Laura without even knowing it. Release Me, a beautiful elegiac song from their debut LP A Song Inside My Head, A Demon in My Bed was recently used by Saab for a prominent advertising campaign which featured heavily on Australian TV. Ever since it graced our screens the previously unknown Swedes have enjoyed a sharp surge in popularity based purely on the strength of that one solemn song. And what a song it was. It was a song which was laden with so much expectation. A plaintive ballad that was devoid of music, perhaps just a whisper of a guitar here and there, and held together by a raw, scratchy vocal. That mellifluous voice, as thick and viscid as honey, resonated so strongly it prompted me to seek out this band and purchase their album. It promised to yield to me a new band and an unknown oeuvre of similarly nostalgic tunes, yet what unfolded was wholly unexpected.
The studio version of Release Me is dramatically different when paired with a lilting, country tinged melody. The raw, heartfelt vocals are now tempered by the warm country/folk influences and it aids in alleviating the heaviness of heart induced by Frida Ohrn’s impassioned vocal. It’s still an engaging song but it loses some of the ardour that initially made it so appealing.
Despite their apparent lite country/pop aspirations there’s a strong solemnity which has managed to wend it’s way into every song on this album, perhaps aided to some extent by Ohrn’s bluesy vocals. From the sleepy Call to Arms with its dark country/pop mish mash to the doleful Friend Like Me with its funereal horns and a disconsolate Ohrn wailing in her gravelly tone there’s a sad, woebegone feeling which simmers beneath each song and consequently dictates the tenor of the album.
At times it works remarkably well like in the heavy hearted Thunderbird Motel, with the sad, enduring melody and Ohrn’s disconsolate vocal. However, when they’re not espousing their middle American brand of country they all too readily revert to a cloying, cookie cutter approach such as the cutesy, sentimental pop of Out of Bounds and the twee ballad Raining in New York.
There is nothing particularly remarkable about Oh, Laura. They’re just another emerging band espousing an ambivalent country/pop meld that neither wholly gratifies nor displeases. The problem lies in their appropriation of a genre and reference points which they seem to know very little of. Their songs are littered with references to the American landscape, to roads they have never traversed and cities they are yet to visit. Perhaps because English is their second language they all too readily resort to well worn clichés which consequently make the songs sound tired and uninspiring.
If they were to just dispense with the malapropisms and trite platitudes and simply sing about what they know - nothing more, nothing less - than Oh, Laura could be a band worth seeking out. It’s a shame because Frida Ohrn has one of the most engaging voices I’ve heard in a very long time and it goes some way to redeeming the inconsistencies on this album. Not all of them though and perhaps that’s why, for now, Oh Laura are nothing more than just a transient music moment.
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