-- by Joe D'Angelo, with additional reporting by Steve Schlueter
Sondre Lerche is an old soul. Despite his disheveled wardrobe and boyish features — which come with the territory when you're all of 20 years old — Lerche's music nods back to a musical era marked by lush forms and playful melodies that give rise to tunes extolling the virtues of love. Sondre Lerche is classic that way.
"It's kind of hard for me to put a label on it," he said when asked to describe the sound of his debut album, Faces Down. "I really prefer when other people do that, especially people here in the States. They like to call it folkie lounge pop."
If the Norwegian native created some "folkie lounge pop" for his debut, he also included a luxurious, string-laced pop ballad for its first single, "You Know So Well," percussion-heavy tribal pop on "Sleep on Needles," Beatles-esque atmospheric pop on "Suffused With Love," a sunny-day pop duet on "Modern Nature," elevator pop that turns to rock on "Virtue and Wine," and ... you get the picture. Lerche flips through his versatile modes and shows them off like he's leafing through a photo album on Faces Down. The only thing that binds the pages together is one key ingredient: pop.
"All artists will want to tell you, 'Oh, my music is so unique that it can't be part of a genre,' so I'm not going to say that about myself." Lerche said. "I'm quite happy with my music being labeled pop music."
Faces Down isn't pop the way that Britney Spears or Avril Lavigne interpret it. The songs fall closer in line with the genre molded by Burt Bacharach, the Beatles, and Beach Boy Brian Wilson, just a few of the songwriters from whom Lerche takes his cues.
"I was really influenced by Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello and Steely Dan and Cole Porter," said the wunderkind who wrote his first song at 14 and enough to fill an album two years later. "And lately I've been listening to a lot of Prefab Sprout and some of the English alternative pop music from the '80s. And I was also influenced a lot by great artists like Beck and the High Llamas, and — I guess I can say this because it's MTV — but I'm a huge fan of Justin Timberlake. His last album is really awesome. Honestly, I've been listening to it more than most other new records I heard last year."
Lerche hails from Norway's second largest city, Bergen, which he said has a very diverse and open-minded music scene. It's easy to draw a correlation between the scene and the young songwriter's sound.
"There's a huge music scene in Bergen," he said. "Lots of people doing all kinds of very diverse music, very independently and very separated from whatever else is happening around them. There's definitely something very good going on in Bergen."
Lerche is very affable in conversation. Not much seems like it can upset the mild-mannered lad, save for some people's poor sense of geography when it comes to his homeland.
"Norway is not the capital of Sweden — as many people think," he declared. "We are just neighboring countries."
It's apparently a common confusion, and given the recent rise in prominence of the Swedish scene, evidenced by the Hives and Division of Laura Lee, many Norwegians like Lerche pride themselves on standing on their own.
"We definitely want to break free from the shadow of Sweden," he said. "So whenever Sweden has success, we probably go like Homer Simpson and say, "Doh! I wish that were us."
Sondre Lerche tour dates, according to Astralwerks:
- 5/16 - Carrboro, NC @ Cat's Cradle
- 5/17 - Atlanta, GA @ TBA
- 5/19 - Houston, TX @ Fat Cat's (formerly Mary Jane's)
- 5/20 - Austin, TX @ Emo's
- 5/21 - Dallas, TX - Gypsy Tea Room
- 5/22 - Little Rock, AR @ Vino's
- 5/23 - Lawrence, KS @ The Bottleneck
- 5/24 - Omaha, NE @ Sokol Underground
- 5/25 - Minneapolis, MN @ Ascot Room
- 5/27 - Columbus, OH @ Little Brothers
- 5/28 - Ann Arbor, MI @ Blind Pig
- 5/29 - Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern
- 5/30 - Montreal, QC @ La Sala Rossa
- 5/31 - Ottawa, ON @ Babylon
- 6/1 - Quebec City, QC @ Kashmir
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