Hans Appelqvist's short (well under half an hour in length) fourth album finds the Swedish musician in a fairly playful mood, with the opening "Wanxian" sounding like something between a children's TV show theme and a jazz-leaning collage of samples. It's a good calling card for the album as a whole, as straightforward melodies on guitar or keyboards, matched at a couple of points by his reflective vocals, are spiked with sonic elements that could be at home with
Spike Jones, Bugs Bunny, or
Kid Koala. Plucked strings, animal calls, murky recordings of cracking branches, sudden swells of cuckoo-clock sounds, even a young child saying something perhaps nonsensically (then again, one would need Swedish-language skills to know for sure) on "Tilli Talli Tulli" -- all interject themselves throughout the album, seemingly at random but also as clearly part of the overall aesthetic as the sometimes fragmentary songs themselves. That said, the music can be just as elaborately strange in its own right -- the hyperactive piano melodies on "Freckenåges Spa" sound like
Steve Reich on speed, the semi-music hall arrangement (of sorts) on "Skundgässhallen," and more all tweak expectations handily. But perhaps the closing number, "Talkijangnas Akt," does so the most by being the most straightforward, with its elegantly triumphant guitar chime finding a surprising middle ground between tense early-'80s AOR and flecks of contemporary
U2. The surprise is mitigated by more of the odd sampling prevalent elsewhere on the album but still makes for a strong, unusual conclusion.