Larsen & Furious Jane
Zen sucker
Morningside Records
Despite the laughable name of both the group and their album, Larsen & Furious Jane are by far one of the best bands I've heard this year. An amalgamation of the melancholic immediacy of fellow countrymen Kashmir and the more contemplative vein of Interpol's register -- though this American influence only extends so far, most notably on "A deathbed conversion". A naming of influences also does little with an act like Larsen & Furious Jane; the majority of the record is difficult to place in this way. "Zen sucker" is a wonderfully luxuriant album -- its various components are in no hurry, despite the rather short length of the songs (only two tracks break the 4-minute mark), taking their time to build off the first moments of a composition and creating a extraordinarily functional mass of instrumentation, the timbre of the voice chosen to appropriately settle into this mixture: an almost Ian Curtis/Paul Banks tone adopted on "A deathbed conversion"; a somber, nearly-spoken register taken with "Snakes in the grass"; a contemporary Brit-pop style utilized within "A car that comes with the job"; a very Scandinavian quality (similar to The Radio Dept.'s approach) imbued into "Fine". In the end, "Zen sucker" is a record painted in almost every despondent, sorrowful hue that we've come to expect from Kashmir's contemporaries, but that somehow fits into these early summer days. There is a fragile sense of a hope intertwined in the beauty of Larsen & Furious Jane's music -- sometimes that's all you need.
- Lars Garvey Laing-Peterson
