Album Review
Jeniferever
Spring Tides

Swedish playwright August Strindberg said, “People are constantly clamouring for the joy of life. As for me, I find the joy of life in the hard and cruel battle of life.” Fellow countrymen, Jeniferever, understand this and their pursuit of joy is not a clamour, but a hard, cruel battle of vast orchestrations that are in no rush to deliver gratification. Listeners need to wander the expansive snowscapes of their post-rock instrumentation, sometimes being blinded by the brilliance, other times being haunted by the scarcity of beauty and the solitary expanses.

Like Strindberg the band seem to want to attain a “greater naturalism”. To make music that doesn’t offer the mundane, the “slice of life”, but rather music that presents itself, or certainly results in, a psychological battle of brains (“hjärnornas kamp”).  Yet, again like Strindberg, they sacrifice naturalism’s tenets and its attempts to create a perfect illusion through music and prose, a secular world-view and by focussing on the contemporary and indigenous, for expressionism as they distort reality for emotional effect.

This blending of naturalism and expressionism may have grown from spending the past decade in relative isolation, hiding in the snowy desolation of a country that is, remarkably, the third largest music exporter in the world, with over 800 million dollars of revenue in 2007, surpassed only by the US and the UK.

It is this desolation that we feel in Spring Tides that drives the philosophy and influences the orchestrations. It gives Spring Tides both its eeriness and its rebelliousness: a mix of ambient, post-rock and goth. It is what allows Jeniferever’s songs to feel expansive and what heightens the created sense of beating winds built by the sometimes seemingly ceaseless thundering of guitars.

It is a powerful atmosphere brought to life by instruments that seem frozen by the extremities of their surroundings. Instruments such as organs, xylophones, horns, bells, guitars, piano and drums that swirl in heady conflagration. As a distant narrator, singer Kristofer Jonson’s vocals add an ethereal (some may say insipid) tone to the mix, as he quietly calms the oppressiveness of the instruments.

While this would seem to point to an album that is unified in its expression and its sound, Spring Tides is oddly discordant – one moment being the simple beauty of Ingrid Bergman, the next being the complexity of Ingmar Bergman, depicting bleakness and despair in an exploration of the human condition.

Yet when these two forces come together (as the Bergmans did in 1972’s Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata)), the result is a wonderful blend of beauty and despair, of simplicity and complexity, of power and grace. This can be seen in St Gallen, with its gentle piano shivering alongside the more forceful brass and stormy guitars before Jonson’s tender vocals emerge four minutes in.

Spring Tides is consuming, unusual post-rock that forces listeners to lie in the barren cold before appreciating its warmth. This is what post-rock is about – not the obvious incorporation of ambience with rock, or the digitizing of melodies – but the creation of an aesthetic that, unlike postmodernism, is not interested in describing a condition or a state of being, or focussing on social and political endeavours. Instead, it is interested in emotion and in Jeniferever’s case, this is brought to life by a polymathic blend of instruments.

Jeniferever is showing that just maybe, post-rock is heading the revival of expressionism.