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Zen Sucker Doesn't Get Lost In Translation

Larsen & Furious Jane Put Denmark on the Map

Larsen & Furious Jane

Zen Sucker

Released on May 19, 2008

Denmark’s Larsen & Furious Jane is a band as mysterious as the music it plays.  The vast majority of press articles about the group are understandably in Danish.  Translations of Danish-language articles, courtesy of Google, are hardly helpful as they refer to albums as “plates” and jumble sentences worse than a toddler.  The few English-language articles I found came from Cool Junkie, the Chewing Gum for the Ears blog and The Celebrity Café.  While these reviews were well-written and their authors deserve credit for beating Pitchfork and NME to the punch, they are hardly first-rate Web sites and they are scarce on specific details about the band.  Larsen & Furious Jane’s blog only features links to album reviews, details about live performances and self-deprecating humor.  The band’s record label is linked, but Morningside Records refers visitors back to the band’s Web site in a cruel back-and-forth.  So where do we go from here? 

Really, we ought to drop everything we’re doing and order Zen Sucker on vinyl, cross our fingers and hope the whole currency conversion factor works out in the end.  Reviews of Zen Sucker—both Danish and English alike—recognized a departure from the band’s two previous albums and were overwhelmingly in favor of the new sound.  Based on piecemeal information, it seems safe to say that Larsen & Furious Jane reinvented itself since 2004’s I’m Glad He’s Dead and 2005’s Tourist with a Typewriter, shedding anywhere from 3-5 members and writing more than 40 songs and tossing most in the trash.  We owe the band for sticking with it and delivering the 13 songs on Zen Sucker, as it’s doubtless one of the best albums of 2008.

On the album, Larsen & Furious Jane falls somewhere in between pre-Good News Modest Mouse and any-era Interpol.  Comparisons to fellow Danish shoegazers Mew are warranted on “The People Person Is A Zen Sucker” and virtually nowhere else.  In fact, comparisons are risky business in the first place, especially with a group as mysterious as Larsen & Furious Jane.

The album’s first full song “A Deathbed Conversion” is full of regret, but rolling drums and banging piano keys push it along. With its bouncy keyboard riff, “Fine” sounds like the exception to an otherwise somber album, but when the lyrics shift from “It is fine” to “Kill me now” and “Finish me off,” we know the album’s tone.  “Dancing Bear” is probably the most accessible song on the album.  Melodic guitars and keyboards drop into a powerful chorus about “taking a dive.”  Unfortunately, the tail end of the track suffers from a bit too much repetition, making it feel like the band was unsure of how to wrap up the song so they chose to jam for the last minute or so.  “Vietnamese Pool Boy” and “Snakes In The Grass” are the album’s rebel rousers, the former with spastic guitars and full-throated wails and the latter with horns hinting at dread and a looming intensity.  In “Snakes In The Grass,” there’s even some name-dropping, with references to ghosts of Christmas past (Dickens), a butcher and his knife (Tolstoy or Cursive), the tolling of bells (Poe) and the siren song (Greek mythology).

On Zen Sucker, Larsen & Furious Jane achieve a fuller, more appealing sound as a five-piece than they did as an eight- or ten-piece.  They pull it off by weaving simple instrumentals into a swathe of sound while taking care not to build up just for the sake of building up.  While the band seems frantic in its search for melodic finesse, luckily for them and for us, they’ve found it. With Zen Sucker, they’ve produced one of the year’s best albums in the process.

Posted by Ben Wadington on Dec 03, 2008 @ 1:00 pm