The way Lena Fjortoft sings feels earth-shattering. Her voice blows like reeds in a field, light but piercing. With her first solo record, Strange Light, she cuts through the static electricity with the voltage of 1,000 television sets being tossed into the ocean. Songs like “Violets” and the jangly “Bell Jar” rise and fall with the agility of a lark, remarkably and brutally divine in both vocal performance and home-spun lyrics. When left to her own devices, Fjortoft appears to take flight in ways she couldn’t possibly have before. “I want you, baby,” she sings with a sharp frankness in the former. “Wrapped up in her arms / The taste on your lips / I know that someday I’ll be the one…”
“I float home a little lower than I was,” she sings barely above a whisper in “Satellite Star,” practically a fuel-charged excursion through the cosmos. “Bring me down, but it’s worth it to have you ’round.” It’s that sheer poeticism in the arrangement that makes the lyrics glisten like rubies in the sun. “Lavender” burrows into similar stylistic soil but with a heavier, more somber tone. Likewise, the closing track “Parties” pushes its way to the front as Fjortoft’s most cutting and wondrously tragic. “I need some kind of love and attention,” she admits.
Strange Light emerges as a tremendous setpiece, informed by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Carole King. Fjortoft magnetically attaches herself to the sticky part of your brain that stores melodies like a time capsule, linked to a specific time and place of scattered newspapers, rabbit ears on TVs, and wringer washers. “In another time, in another place, in another spaceship stuck in space,” she sings in the starry-eyed “Alien in a Cardigan.” Its pick-up-and-go rhythm sends the listener careening into the windswept instrumentation that crescendos throughout the arrangement.
Lena Fjortoft makes a bid for one of the year’s best albums. Strange Light wrings everything she has pent-up in her soul, as though she wouldn’t survive without pouring it all into the record. And perhaps, that’s true. It’s nine tracks of musical bliss, wrapped tightly within a folk package ready to be unwrapped.
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