LENKA – GOOD DAYS: REVIEW
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LENKA
Good Days (Skipalong Records)
THERE’S A LIGHTNESS mood in Lenka Kripac’s new album which is not a reflection of the topics as such – though a title like Good Days isn’t hiding that light under a bushel and even the label’s name, Skipalong Records, is kicking up its heels – but of intent. Everything about it has the feel of a record made to celebrate being able to make a record like this.
Now that may sound circular, but well before the end – an end that arrives not quite 34 minutes in, which tells you firstly that its 10 tracks mostly top out soon after three minutes, and then that you probably want this on CD rather than vinyl if you don’t like getting up every quarter hour - Good Days reveals itself to be a collection of songs that very much enjoy the musical garden in which Kripac and producer Tony Buchen have set them. Your happiness is not the point but the inevitable by-product.
How so? Note how the “just noodling” soul piano preamble of So Far So Good smiles with light satisfaction just before the song proper arrives like it’s gambolling in a field and pulling you along with it. That first touch is inquisitive but immediately we get girl group glimmer (more Dixie Cups innocence than Shangri-Las knowingness) and strings that shine rather than urge along. There’s an even shinier mid-’60s stomp in Love Is A Beat, the sprinkling guitars and upright piano say we’re moving, the voice is airy and optimistic, and you can’t miss the throwback to the Go-Gos doing something similar when Kripac and backing vocals stomp up “love is a beat” in place of “we got the beat”. They know it, they like it.
The self-explanatory aspirations of Sunshine Girl – “I wish I could be your sunshine girl every day of the week/Only blue skies with your sunshine girl, dancing cheek to cheek” – tips its hat from the start with warm brass coming in the wake of Kripac’s floating-like-a-butterfly vocals. By its end you can practically taste the honey cake sprinkled with nuts and flowers.
And even when “life’s thrown another curve ball” in Silver Linings, the lulling waves of the melody, the breathy, gently nudging vocals, the little reverberations of the drums, all slide against each other like soft bodies bumping into each other on a li-lo.
Oh sure, there’s a Dusty wistfulness in Heart Flame but Kripac but it presents as knowing tenderness is close at hand, and Archetypal flips the script by asking what would it be like if Seeker Lover Keeper were packed into one maxi dress-wearing body that just wanted to dance like they did in Tina Charles filmclips? No one is going to keep a glum face through that.
By the time The Balance unashamedly leans into/borrows/takes in whole Van Morrison’s Moondance – it’s in the organ and handclaps mainly but the bass and flute may as well be wearing shirts patterned with the man’s red beard and off-centre gaze face – that garden of musical earthly delights I mentioned earlier is filled with musicians and listeners picking and choosing freely from the flowers and arranging the results in our hair, a bouquet and scattered petals before us.
Kinda hippie, I grant you, but there’s a mood about the place, and it’s catching on.
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Lenka plays The Vanguard, Newtown, June 25
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