The World Is Saved

It’s your first Stina Nordenstam album that stays with you. For this listener it was the tiny-voiced Swede’s 1998 covers album, People Are Strange, that opened the door into her odd, creaky, twilight world of audible floorboards and front-room mini-orchestras and hard-centred observations hugged within enchanting pearls of mini-pop.
This, her sixth studio album, ticks the same distinctive boxes: there’s the bittersweet, curiously Scandinavian way the mood can turn in an instant from brightness to dread; there’s the warmly recorded, closely mic’ed home-birth atmosphere, all fingers clicking on saxophone keys and the muffled thump of piano pedals; and there’s the unmistakeably strange arrangements of the songs themselves: each instrument given unusual things to do, as if they’re being played and written for by people who don’t quite know how you’re “supposed” to use them.
The secret to discerning this album, then, from its several beautiful siblings, each different, but semi-imperceptibly so, like the sisters in The Virgin Suicides, is via its lyric sheet. Stina’s never had the lightest of hearts, but World’s world is blacker than usual, teeming with embittered, angry lonely-hearts (‘From Cayman Islands With Love’), unextinguished old flames (‘Get On With Your Life’) and homewrecking Other Women (‘Winter Killing’). But the best thing here, as with all of her records, is the total lack of sentimentality: the fact that, as girlish and beguiling as her music might be, we’re not in Dawson’s Creek: there’s a steely, fiercely intelligent, absolutely grown-womanish point of view at its centre. Even the violinists seem to be under instruction not to play too prettily, to keep it concert-hall-pompousness-free; instead – as on the tense, tiger-cub-like pretty savagery of the violin-and-drum-led ‘I’m Staring Out The World’ – they’re ruthlessly raw-sounding and full of menace, like murderer’s hands inside smooth new gloves.