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Brudenell presents...

Sondre Lerche

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“Ask me anything you like/I’ll reveal everything,” Sondre Lerche sang on 2002 single “Sleep On Needles,” and the Norwegian musician has spent the last decade proving his lines true. To call him a singer-songwriter might be the technical term, but he’s been a jazz bandleader, a punk howler, a would-be Springsteen, a transatlantic teen idol – not bad for a guy pushing 30. On Sept. 4, he’ll pause and look back with vinyl reissues of his first four albums, some dozen-plus digital bonus tracks and Bootlegs, his first-ever live document. Lerche’s career famously started young: debut album Faces Down bowed at the tail end of his teenage years, starting a national frenzy that landed him a Best New Artist trophy at the Norwegian Grammys.

Breathless magazine profiles credited him with formal music training at age 9, which he now says didn’t take. “To say I’m formally trained is giving me more credit,” he laughs. “I still to this day cannot read music.” But he was drawn to the guitar, intrigued by the colorful bossa nova chords that have filled his albums since. He learned from the sophistication of Burt Bacharach, the enthusiasm of Elvis Costello, the fearless feelings of A-Ha; even from the beginning, his albums have been love letters to the craft of songwriting.  

Faces Down showcases its singer as an old soul, singing idly of “virtue and wine” with a knowing wink and giving Serge Gainsbourg a run for his avuncular money on coy duet “Modern Nature.” The songs seem as gentle as a parent’s embrace, until they descend into surprising psych-rock excursions that revealed Lerche’s noisier inclinations. The album was compared to the soft sounds of Astralwerks label mates (and Bergen neighbors) Kings of Convenience, among others, though it was Beck’s 1998 release Mutations that helped Lerche corner his influences.  

“That was a really, really important record,” Lerche says. “He managed to make this singer-songwriter album that had all these really exotic, sometimes psychedelic and poppy and tropical influences. It helped me identify the kind of combination of sounds that triggered my instinct.” That eclectic feel is the key to tracks such as “Dead Passengers,” which descends from sighing, string-laden songwriter-pop into a choppy electric breakdown, and in the gritty urgency that brings “Sleep On Needles” directly to the garage before “Suffused With Love” wanders, martini in hand, to the lounge. It’s the kind of album Bacharach might’ve made had he picked up a Fender Strat once in a while instead of lingering at the piano.

For all its musical confidence, Faces Down is a chronicle of romantic nervousness: beyond “Sleep on Needles,” he struggles to find rest in the longing “You Know So Well.” On “Modern Nature,” a duet partner’s presence makes the daylight hours bearable: “I’m wide awake, and so are you,” he joyfully sings. So, too, were the critics: the release made Rolling Stone’s albums and debuts of the year.   Sophomore album Two Way Monologue, Lerche’s best-reviewed record, did anything but slump. Songs such as “On the Tower” and fan favorite “Counter Spark” picked up where Faces Down left off, perfect pieces of wry pop that melt into choruses you’d swear you’d heard a hundred times. When the album hit shelves, he was 21 – “barely old enough to buy you a drink at the bar,” a SPIN review noticed, crediting him for his “innate charm and soothing folk sensibility.” Lerche’s songs are so effortlessly melodic, it’s easy to forget they were written by a young songwriter still fresh off his first U.S. shows. “It was CMJ, I was playing Tonic,” he remembers of his American debut. “People were singing along to my songs. It was really, really wild.” Yet his success never spoiled his work ethic – as the youngest of four children, he wasn’t looking to be babied. “You get a little comfortable in whatever you’re doing and you just want to do something else,” he says.  

He followed up two hit albums with releases that were very much “something else.” After the brotherly Faces Down and Two Way Monologue, 2006’s Duper Sessions sounded like a distant – still handsome – relative. “I was indulging a bit more in my affection for jazz, jazz-related songwriting,” Lerche says of the off-the-cuff sessions, done to kill time before hitting the studio for 2007’s Phantom Punch. “The More I See You,” a song Lerche heard Chet Baker perform a few years earlier, “sparked the whole idea of recording a whole set of songs with that kind of ensemble”; his version appears as the reissue’s bonus cut.   Making a jazz record presented some hurdles. “[Vocally,] I really didn’t have the chops to do it,” Lerche says. “My band, except for the piano player, were not jazz musicians. So I thought there was this almost punk rock vibe to us trying to tackle this material that was completely out of our league.” Humility aside, if there’s strain in these songs, the music don’t betray it: his voice is in rare form on tracks such as “Across the Land” and the falsetto-strewn “Nightingales.” Drummer Ole Ludvig Kruger anchors the album with a loose groove, shuffling along in “Everyone’s Rooting For You” and shifting forward into rock mode on “(I Want To) Call It Love.”  

The album was a chance for Lerche, now three albums in, to pay tribute to his diverse influences directly: its covers include Elvis Costello’s “Human Hands,” Prefab Sprout’s “Nightingales,” and Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” a staple of the live set he’d previously recorded for the Don’t Be Shallow EP. Some took the record as a left turn (the All Music Guide called it, “A surprise. Maybe even a shock”) but others rightly embraced it as the culmination of Lerche’s classicist roots. “I really honestly didn’t feel it was such a bold move or statement at the time,” he says. “I still argue that most of the songs on Duper Sessions could’ve gone on any of the albums I’ve put out.” Six years later, they sound just right where they are. The pocket anthem “(I Wanna) Call It Love” is the record’s most “traditional” Lerche track, and also one of his most clever: “There are reports of a heart-robbing beauty whose victim I know,” he winks, though the chorus commits with laudable sincerity: “When we’ve danced our socks off and it’s late/We’ll lie down to anticipate forever.”  

Phantom Punch, however, was a calculated swerve into the searing rock that’d begun to reveal itself in songs such as “Sleep On Needles” and his increasingly sweaty live shows. By then, coffee shop speakers across America were overflowing with sensitive young guitar players with breathy voices and important feelings; something had to be done. “I always felt, it’s really nice, but it would be nice if just one of you would just scream or do something,” Lerche says. “And I felt, ‘Well, if I feel that way, that’s my responsibility, because I’m one of those guys!’” A tour with Costello, his longtime idol, had left him emboldened to bring more physicality to his performances, and the band trained for the album like Olympic runners, playing marathon sets in intimate venues including Los Angeles’ legendary Troubadour.  

“It was a bold move, it was my brief Springsteen phase,” Lerche says of subjecting fans expecting past favorites to sets of fresh, fuzzy material (and Duper Sessions cuts played with a missing pianist). The trial by fire and his tendency to challenge himself with songs just out of his range caused him to lose his voice. “I had to work with a voice coach to actually find a way to sing these songs every night,” he says. As always, Lerche found it: look no further than “Face the Blood,” his “Helter Skelter,” to hear him rising to the challenge. Tracks such as “John, Let Me Go” (which makes a surprise demo appearance in the Faces Down bonus material) and “The Tape” represent his more “primal” instincts, but his songs have always had that in them – the potential to go from baroque pop to hurtling, anything-goes rock. Album opener “Airport Taxi Reception” was memorable enough to make a 2012 fan of controversial rapper Tyler, the Creator, who took a break from girls and f-bombs to tweet his love for the track. The L.A. sessions yielded songs including “Europa and the Pirate Twins” (a Thomas Dolby cover), “If Not Now” and “I Know It’s the Right Thing to Do,” which make their debuts in the album’s bonus tracks.   By then, Lerche had released four U.S. studio albums in five years; he capped this period, which might be dubbed his Astralwerks years, with the soundtrack to the mature, undersung Steve Carell film Dan in Real Life. After so many years of the musicians’ grind, it was time to step off the treadmill. In 2005, he moved to Brooklyn, properly settling in the Big Apple for good a year later and enjoying the chance to disappear into a metropolis that dwarfed his homeland renown. “I wanted to feel smaller,” he says. “When I first moved here, I wanted to get away from a sense of community because I felt I needed to stand my own ground and figure out things on my own. I also just needed to live a little, to get drunk and make a couple of mistakes.”  

It was a chance for Lerche, ever the little brother, to finish growing up. It’s certainly an adult who takes the stage on Bootlegs, his first live album: his confidence is supreme, from the thrilling guitar interlude that teases toward the chorus of “Two Way Monologue” to the wounded delivery of 2011 single “Domino.” The classics – “Sleep on Needles,” “Two Way Monologue” – squeeze next to the newer songs like reuniting lovers. It’s aided by a raw, simple recording that trades in fidelity for immediacy, the kind of performance Lerche’s been trying to capture on tape for years. There’s a beautiful sense of catharsis to the results: the set was recorded with a single microphone in the Norwegian venue where he’d introduced Faces Down to the world a decade ago, rounded out by a pair of performances in his current hometown.   As a musician whose ceaseless ambition has led him down some half-dozen paths – including the inspired, eclectic songs of 2011’s Sondre Lerche and 2009’s Heartbeat Radio – Bootlegs, due Sept. 4, connects the dots between Bacharach and Bruce, between Bergen and Brooklyn. It finds him on the same map as modern peers including Jens Lekman, Regina Spektor and the Shins’ James Mercer, though the songwriter’s always charted his own course. Bootlegs is the sound of a decade’s potential fulfilled by a performer who’s always seen his limits as walls to break down. Lerche turns 30 this year, a birthday that tends to scare those clinging to the fading bloom of their 20s – but with a lifetime’s legacy behind him, he’s just getting started. “I’m always working on something,” he says. “I’m always dreaming about the next song.”

Thursday 30th October 2014

Price: £10.00 advance (+stbf)

Doors 19:30

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