Current Affair Medium Rare

Albumrecension

Britta Persson's third collection of smart, spiky indie rock/pop is well named, at least if you gloss the title as something like "modern relationships, served semi-bloody." As is by now habitual, this batch of tunes mostly finds the Swedish songwriter experiencing various shades of ambivalence, anxiety, alienation, and regret regarding her attempts to find connection with other humans, whether she's expressing exasperation at a friend's superficiality ("Still Friends"), remembering exes with something less than fondness ("Annoyed to Death," "Time Machine"), or just generally, pensively pondering the perverse complexity of the whole romantic enterprise ("Some Girls Some Boys"). Persson's gradually broadening musical modus — rooted in an artfully deliberate, guitar-heavy, tough 'n' tender approach that's been relatively rare in songwriterly circles since the late '90s or so — is a good match for her unflinching, occasionally squirm-inducing lyrics; both her words and her songs feel at once wary and yet a little uncomfortably exposed. Still, she never entirely lets go of that small, nagging spark of optimism: in "He Flies a Jet," she pleads with a pilot to return her safely to a new lover (even if, she admits, "I might have told you differently last time"), while a couple numbers find her gamely striking out again "with hopes to discover/the big fuss about being a lover." Perhaps not coincidentally, those songs — "Big Fuss" and "For the Steadiness" — feature two of the album's biggest, catchiest choruses (in the latter case, a frantically peppy refrain that's somewhat uncomfortably grafted onto much slower verses), forming a nice counterpoint to the more subtle, subdued melodic pleasures sprinkled elsewhere, like the lilting minor-key guitar line that winds through "If You Don't Love Him." The best things here, though, are the intriguingly dark, driving "Meet a Bear" — which is, among other things, about wanting to empower teenaged Japanese girls to leave unhealthy relationships with older men — and the surprisingly sweet "Toast to M," a touching reflection on a friend's suicide that adopts a curious but never accusatory or condemnatory attitude, and offers an oddly anthemic, rousing refrain: "We don't hold your suicide against you." Though it's slightly front-loaded with these highlights, Current Affair Medium Rare is a solid effort throughout — perhaps not quite up to the level of 2008's very fine Kill Hollywood Me, but definitely close, and an entirely worthy successor. ~ K. Ross Hoffman, Rovi