Breaking Up is Better With Love is All

Artist: Love is All
Album: A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night

Comments: Forget Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Forget the Cold War Kids. Forget Tapes n' Tapes. The only blog band that is currently pushing consistently good tunes is Love is All. The Swedish dance-popper's second album A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night picks up right where Nine Times The Same Song left off, with this album looking at the darker side of love: The break up.

There are problems with Love is All. Their quirky lady lead singer has a voice that will entice some and be a deal breaker for others, as she does have a tendency to push herself into screech mode from time to time. Like Nine Times, A Hundred Things does have a tendency to run together from song to song, especially on the back end. With no slower ballads like "Turn the Radio off," the album also suffers from no change in tempo.

That being said, few bands are making fuzzy pop as well as this. A Hundred Things is an album for girls in boys left in the lurch and bitter, a dark disco album for people who want to scorn their exes by hitting the clubs, dancing like a madman and fucking the first person they see. The album is the definition of sexy self destruction.

Perhaps Love is All's greatest strength is their ability to mix genres. Their warm fuzzy production is distinctly lo-fi, their saxophone and drum beats give them a hipster dance sound that skinny kids in bad scarves can bump to, all while maintain their pop edge. "Last Choice" and "Give it Back" especially showcase this three headed music monster, as either song would sound super fresh on the dance floor or the basement party drinking PBR.

Scathing and clever, these are songs to recover to. "Sea Sick" and "Movie Romance" are especially bitter, rejecting notions of true love and adolescent lust in favor of more realistic, albeit more tragic, views on human emotion. Which is just a really pretentious way of saying that the songs are mature at best and jaded at worst.

But who cares if the tunes are jaded? A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night is the kind of album that can be appreciated on both a visceral and intellectual level. Love is All looked the sophomore slump in the face and forced it to dance, and established themselves as one of the bands to watch in the coming years.


Rating: 8 out of 10

Key Tracks: Give it Back, Last Choice, When Giants Fall, Movie Romance

Buy, Steal, Skip: Buy