I completely missed the point of Håkan Lidbo’s first album. Maybe that was because I just fast forwarded through it in a record store, which is a sure-fire way of getting the wrong impression of an album. In any case, Håkan’s second album consists of music that definitely demands (and deserves) more that a quick hear-through.
The music can best be described as sparse, every sound is given lots of room. And what sounds! The most electronic, but also the phattest by a long shot. That they feel so brutally phat is of course due to the sparse production. No wall of sound this, but rather a thin forest with seriously sturdy trees. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the brilliant “Prewinder”, where the acoustic sounds from Fredrik Davidsson’s flugelhorn drifts like a magic mist between the giant electronic redwoods. Also worth special mention is the title track, which manages to use computer generated voices to a good end, without sounding cliché.
But to single out special tunes is really to do it a disservice, as the album is very much an Album, not a collection of loose tracks. Not that it’s the same thing over and over again, but that there is a definite red line going through it.
My only complaint is the obligatory hidden track after the end of the record–clearly a play on the title, but it takes more than a 20-second cabaret sample to make the fifteen minute wait worthwhile. Do people still think hidden tracks are cool? But that’s just a trifle, it doesn’t detract from the the fact that After the End still is 60 minutes of lovely music.
