Sondre Lerche "Avatars of Love"
A double album of pop music is rarely tidy, and Norwegian singer-songwriter Sondre Lerche’s own two-disc entry, Avatars of Love, is gorgeously messy, especially because Lerche devotes its entire 86-minute runtime to honest depictions of romantic love.
His craftsmanship, however, is elegant: over 20 years after the release of his debut LP, Faces Down, Lerche has become as sleek and artful a creator as Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier, whose most recent movie, 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, is a beautiful romantic comedy and drama for people who understand the real world’s lack of happy or neat endings.
Lerche’s audio CinemaScope showcases lively, varied settings, such as the MIDI-fied bossa nova of “Dead of the Night,” in which he almost inhabits the seductive tone of the great Antônio Carlos Jobim; the increasingly ornate Cole Porter melancholy of “Turns Out I’m Sentimental After All”; and the sun-blinded trip-hop of “Summer in Reverse,” with the four-woman Tokyo band CHAI singing breezes across him.
The narratives are at least as varied, and each disc opens with purposeful meandering. “Guarantee That I’d Be Loved” tells a short story in each verse, accumulating a village of heartbreaks, and the title track lists many a love- and thought-enhancing piece of music, accumulating a small library of hope and loss
After the introductions, Lerche deploys his Elvis Costello-level songwriting intelligence tightly—“Cut” compresses Roxy Music’s Avalon and Peter Murphy’s “Cuts You Up” into New Wave sharpness—and broadly—both the title track and “Dead of the Night” pass the 10-minute mark. Classical passages run up against electronics, which nudge indie-folk guitars, and there’s room for all.
Jobim’s ghost again finds space alongside graceful strings and another talented Norwegian singer-songwriter, AURORA, in the finale, “Alone in the Night,” and they help Lerche capture two lovers in their own world. The disquieting orchestral coda suggests an intrusion on the aching bliss, but Avatars of Love leaves them, and us, in that fleeting, charged, untidy moment.
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