The Sondre Lerche show began a little early on Saturday night, when Nightlands invited a hoodied Lerche out to the Crocodile stage to help with an uptempo cover of Lindsey Buckingham’s “Trouble.” (Hear a Lerche-less, looped-up version here.)
Dave Hartley (aka Nightlands) made a point of asking the crowd, “You know you have one the best clubs in the country, right?” And Lerche took a moment at the beginning of his set to marvel at the makeover, reflecting that the first time he played the Crocodile, they wouldn’t let him into the “green room”–he had to wait outside in his van. Where it was cold, he pointed out. But now, triumphantly, he was returning, and on a Saturday night, too.
At 28, the Norwegian singer-songwriter has written his first adult album, to hear him tell it. He played seven (out of the ten) tracks on his the self-titled album, along with Lerche standards such as “Airport Taxi Reception,” “Two Way Monologue,” and “Phantom Punch.” Hartley backed him up on bass, Kishi Bashi handled the violin and keyboards, Herremannen the drums. Lerche made sure to announce the upbeat songs, since there only two–no, three!–by his count. But his audience were not there after bubblegum, in any event.
In giving the album an A-, Entertainment Weekly called it an “artful melding of jazzy folk with punchy power pop,” and if you’ve seen Lerche live before, it’s the power pop shredding that will make your eyes widen. It’s not brash noise; Lerche doesn’t write like that, and he doesn’t play like that either. It seems a little unfair that someone with his voice and songwriting skills should also be so quick-fingered on the guitar, but those are the breaks. Live, he goes after it.
That said, he’s not likely to lose the Burt Bacharach label any time soon, as long as he’s writing lyrics like in “Ricochet”: ” Shimmering underneath the sea / Sentimental echoes spark my memory / Hard to make believe nothing means anything to me,” where those sudden might-have-beens that overtake you are compared to accidental woundings.
He was also feeling a little chatty, drolly checking in with the audience on the night’s vibe as if solicitously feeling out a girlfriend’s mood, and giving a short lesson in how Bergeners pronounce “herre mann” (“gentleman” in Norwegian).
For the last song of his encore trio, Lerche led a sing-a-long of “Modern Nature,” and although I don’t normally video performances out of concerns for music quality and misrepresenting the experience, I wanted to catch a little bit of how the crowd was right there with Lerche’s tricky dialogue, all the way to the end.
