Prattle

I didn’t really expect this. OK, so it’s Nina Persson, whom I somewhat adore. I can listen to Cardigans albums for hours. But the first A Camp album was a bit too downbeat and sparse for my liking. Not so this second album, which adds some relative energy and variety of emotions to the outstanding lyrics and immaculate vocal performance.

I first listened to this on a plane in January, while reading an overly-gushing review of it in Word magazine. I decided they were wrong, with their Abba references. But eventually I came to agree. It’s beautiful, and there are no tracks which I skip, providing I’ve got the time to listen to it all. It might have taken a couple of transatlantic flights and 3 or 4 listens, but after that first encounter a year ago, it never really shifted from being my favourite album of the year.

POP! Not sure why this never really took off. The estate of Biggy Smalls forced him to re-record his first radio hit (Hypntz became Symphonies), with instantly-diminishing returns, but it remained a great song.

There are some great singles on this record, and “Alone” remains one of the finest singles of the year, I think. For some time, I found the excellence of these tracks distracting, and was unimpressed by the rest of the album. But once the initial obsession had worn off, those other songs made a stronger case for themselves. Listened to on a long drive home from wherever, or played live at his bouncing gigs, this is a bloody brilliant album.