Jeniferever

Spring Tides

(Monotreme)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

This was one of those rare albums that just trapped me, wrapped me up, and enraptured me from the first couple of notes, and didn’t let me out of their sonic blanket until the CD had stopped. I was not expecting that at all.

Jeniferever is a Swedish band, and have been playing together since 1996, and I’m just wondering why it took them this long to find me. That’s what this feels like, it’s personal, every song, every note – it moves out and reaches into you, and you just know that you didn’t find this band, they came looking for you. The first song sets and holds the mood; beautiful, cold, spacious, and drifting, but at the same time “Green Meadow Island” is full of warmth and trust and passion. Hints of bands like Mogwai and Godspeed! You Black Emperor spill out in shifting times and melodics, but are layered underneath the shimmers of harmonic delicacies.

Delicacies that sometimes are pushed against fragments of something more harsh and jarring, but these fragments are still tied to the beauty of the whole. Perhaps like twists of early Modest Mouse, dropping Dramamine along a Trail of Dead so you can find your way back home. Maybe like listening to the Appleseed Cast, if they were covering songs by Codeine. The vocals, the voice, speaks directly to you, “Ox-eye” becoming a sad poem to a lost lover, and you never knew until now that that lover was you. Every song holds a secret that opens only to you.

The music hits like raindrops across a Slint song, breaking up into light and thunder. Every song ends at just the right time, but leaves you wanting just a little more. Each song hints at an aching that leads you a little closer to forever. “St. Gallen” moves out with piano melancholy, and then the rhythm kicks in, pushing waves of that warmth and iciness together until the song becomes a strange monochromatic kaleidoscope. The vocals are earnest and yearning and moving along the guitar lines with strength and compassion, and it almost hurts your heart to listen to this. Then when the guitars rise and raise and explode, you almost scream with the release.

“Nangijala,” possibly (probably?) named after the land in “The Brothers Lionheart” by Astrid Lindgren, clocks in at just over nine and a half minutes long, but when it ends, you feel as if just a second of your life has passed by. The longest song of the 10 tracks, it falls perfectly halfway through, and starts out slow and low and aching and as the minutes pass, as the story unfolds, the guitars push and crash and stomp out like a Seam song you always wanted them to play. Then “Sparrow Hills” comes, pushing you back into a more current frame of mind, getting your thoughts back from spiraling out, and the mysterious and seductive ebb and flow continues, keeping you safe within this bands gravitational pull.

The disc ends with the second longest song on the album, and the title track, “Spring Tides.” It’s a smooth and consistent, almost psychedelic farewell to all who have listened this far, and it just puts everything away, tucks you in, kisses you on the forehead, and promises to visit again soon. It’s like a post-rock Mary Poppins floating away on some slight emo-gazed umbrella, but so much better.