- Kairo
- Caravan
- Plot
- Marionettes
- City Of My Dreams
- Hey Doctor
- Aurora
- Well You Needn't
- Ugly Beautiful
- Red Sailor Girl
- Silent Revolution
- Singer from Hell
- Dizcharmed
- Why
- Arms against reality
- Captain Crunch
- Rain in Spain
- Happy People
Sophie Dunér and the Callino Quartet
rec.2011
Sophie Dunér is a real one-off. For her latest disc she has been produced by Michael Haas, who has clearly responded to her highly idiosyncratic approach, which is jazz-derived but ultimately transcendent of that appellation. Here her arrangements are performed, as written, by the Callino Quartet, a classical group. The result is a disc of some invention, some peculiarity, but always wholehearted commitment.
A song like Kairo exudes something of Leonard Cohen's poetic sensibility in its lyrics, though Dunér's vocals - part Weimar curdle, part Kate Bush yelp - take some getting used to, a feeling reinforced by the texture of the string quartet which might have been profitably expressionist but instead is rather palidly impressionist. She infiltrates North African sounding curlicues into Ellington's Caravan - not exactly Alice Babs, this-whilst the narrative of The Plot becomes a psycho-dramatic recitative. Something that really suits her basketcase blues ethos, crossed with a touch of Bjork and Gospel, is Marionettes (her lyrics are spellbindingly kooky) though her theatricality seems, on disc at least, frequently overdone. The rock `n' roll groove of Hey Doctor, complete with Hendrix-style fiddle solo again cites marionettes in the lyrics. This inter-referencing is an interesting index of her literary fixations - dolls, inside and outside, surface and reality, a certain streak of cruelty, almost bipolarity. She stretches her jazz chops again on Well You Needn't though it remains disappointingly scat-lite.
Her bizarre narratives and her off-kilter persona are always intriguing though sometimes off-putting; her weirdly pitched vocals similarly something of an acquired taste. She seems to infiltrate show tune-like ideas, as well as Weill parlando updated in Captain Crunch. The lyrics are again about surface and reality, and the nasty story, about a killer, is both melodramatic and also underwhelming. For real menace you'd need to turn to something infinitely more allusive and subtle - something like Randy Newman's In Germany Before the War. It's also about a child killer, but approaches the matter with devastating nonchalance. She lets herself go in You - which is mad, but fun. I wish she'd let herself go a bit more often, without taking things to excess.
The Swedish singer songwriter is a protean artist. She's far more engaging and wacky than most artists around, albeit sometimes problematically so. As I listened, my review page became littered with comments on possible influences, stylistic affiliations, but after the ones noted above - and there are many more - I gave up and tried to listen to the coiled, contradictory, emotionally complex, rather fascinating creature that is Sophie Dunér.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
SOPHIE DUNÉR PRODUCTIONS 944976
