From Glee to twee…

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[5.00]

Martin Skidmore: Twee indie is about my least favourite music in the world. She’s a decent (if mannered) singer when not doing cutesy and unconvincing sound effects, but this is a particularly droney and whiney number, though with some quite sweet and effective musical moments.
[3]

John Seroff: The lightly mannered diction brings to mind Leonard Cohen, the melody is late-era Neil Diamond and the ostentatiously silly onomatopoeia is very Björk. The complete package is endearing, but a bit too quiet when it means to be loud and the awkwardness that’s meant to be sold as precious often is just awkward. It’s a pleasant enough old blanket, but not a song I think I’d feel the need to come back to.
[6]

Chuck Eddy: Unadorned cross-country-ski Eurofolk subverted and/or modernized by much-too-proudly quirky onomatopoeic electronic sound-effect doodads, not to mention symphonic arrangement kitsch and an inability to pronounce certain words. A shame — the initial unadorned part was quite pretty, but before long this feels way beyond precious.
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: Annika Norlin spends the chorus of “Arjeplog” making train noises, which is a textbook case of someone becoming too twee to function. I have all kinds of tolerance for quirk in a nicely written indie-pop tune, but my patience wears thin when a singer starts narrating an event as if she were an overexcited five year old.
[2]

Alex Macpherson: When will these twee, hand-wringing artists realise that coming across like child-women doesn’t make them cute or charming, it makes them seem like emotionally stunted human beings? Here, Annika Norlin tries to convey feeling via onomatopoeia, as though she’s a particularly trying nursery school assistant, and the results are pitiful.
[3]

Rodney J. Greene: She yarls empty verses and exceedingly unclever non-hooks over a tedious arrangement. Things finally get good when she shuts up and the strings burst like seeds in spring, but, damn, that doesn’t make up for what came before.
[3]

Martin Kavka: This song first appeared on Hello Saferide’s album late in 2008, and became a single right around the time of the Jukebox’s resurrection this year. Annika Norlin has written better songs than this; the deliberate nature of the waltz steers too close to plodding-drinking-song for my taste. But it’s her best lyric ever, and it may be my favorite pop lyric of the year. Most of “Arjeplog” is an ode to a small town in northern Sweden, the freedom that being in the purity of nature can bring, and how getting out of the city can energize a relationship. In the last line, it also wistfully attests to the way in which nature — and a relationship — ends up inevitably being stifling and leads one to “return to you, city, again and again.” Its closest American parallel is Iris DeMent’s magisterial “Our Town,” and this is almost as good.
[9]

Iain Mew: More Short Stories from Hello Saferide is an album all about the joys and pains of growing up. “Arjeplog”, at its conclusion, is a song about having a place where you can get away from having to. A delicate love song to the Swedish countryside as much as to the human lover in it, it casts off all worries with a smile as its escapist chorus swells and takes off beyond mere words. “Our feet in the snow are like shp-shp-shp/And the choir in my chest is like oh-oh-ohhh-oh!” it goes. Then comes the kicker — “And the Stockholm insecurity is like I don’t exist“. It’s one of the most uplifting things I’ve ever heard. All the more so in fact for being so rooted in realism — she still admits that she has to return to the city and the everyday by the end of the song, but does so with an unmistakable new hope.
[10]

Cecily Nowell-Smith: There’s something about this song that makes me feel — uneasy. Creeped out, even. I think it’s what I’m going to call the a Japanese woman fries an egg and asks you about your day effect. The song’s recorded very close, low whispery singing, and she uses the endearment “my love” as tender punctuation, and it all feels a bit too… too right there, you know? And then you start to wonder about the other people who listen to this record, the people who bought it. Like maybe when they listen to it it feels like she’s right there, like she’s real and in their lives, this gentle insecure girlfriend who likes going for walks and is a bit ridiculous when she copies the sound of trains and comes to visit the place you grew up and finds it enchanting and thinks you could probably settle down here, but after a few days she changes her mind, and that’s okay, you were getting bored anyway. Like this song is four and a half minutes’ worth of being in a relationship, the ideal relationship of maybe a few guys of my acquaintance. Like there are people who, in moments of weakness, might go out to a park with her voice in the headphones and pretend they’re holding hands. Look, even the bandname is a call to lonely souls — Hello, it says, hello. Is it her you’re looking for?
[4]

Matt Cibula: epic emo swell yes / herky jerky indie chamber waltz no
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