REVIEW: Lina Tullgren - Won

Laura Kerry

Lina Tullgren lives in Maine, away from the usual music hubs of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Oakland or Los Angeles. But the artist has managed to find a musical community that includes her parents (her mother is trained in flute and baroque theory and her father raised her on jazz), her collaborator Ty Ueda, and a shifting group of other talented musicians. She is certainly not alone up there in the north.

In her debut LP, however, Tullgren seems transfixed by solitude. Won features Ueda and three other collaborators playing more than a few different instruments, but Tullgren’s voice stands out, raw and evocative. More expressive than pretty in most songs, it leads the way through soul-bearing indie rock songs about growing up, losing and keeping relationships, and loneliness. Tullgren’s voice seems to emerge unmediated from her thoughts and feelings.

Many of those thoughts and feelings are tinged with sadness. Throughout Won, Tullgren sings about the risks of opening up and the challenges of some friendships. “My heart on a string / Doesn’t mean anything,” she sings in “Fitchburg State,” and “What does it mean to wear your heart on your sleeve?” in “Red Dawn.” She asks many questions in the album (a fact acknowledged in “Face Off” with the lines, “I have more questions now / Do you know what love looks like?”), and the phenomenon seems to relate to another theme in Won: the lost feeling that comes in leaving childhood behind. Tullgren sums it up nicely with the seamless coopting of the Bob Dylan lyric, “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now” (“Slow”).

Not all of Won is so straightforwardly melancholy, though. Dissonant and off-kilter elements create intriguing tension in the album. In standouts such as “Asktell,” “Red Dawn,” and “Summer Sleeper,” Tullgren perfectly balances plainly beautiful songwriting with more unconventional touches. “Asktell” occasionally erupts in bright and discordant bursts over its foundational moody pulse; “Red Dawn,” slower and more reflective, is woozy with its wash of distortion and loose guitar; and “Summer Sleeper” sounds like sad, twisted Beach Boys (appropriate for its central message, “I’ll stay home where I am safe / Sleep all summer”). None of the tracks on Won are overly dense or complicated, but the band manages to tease out interesting dynamics through unexpected but simple interplay between parts.

Lina Tullgren’s debut is full of contradictions. For an artist who writes and sings so deftly about wanting to retreat from friendships, she works remarkably well with her collaborators. For an album that reflects on the woes of opening up, it is remarkably intimate and candid. And for a debut, it is notably elegant and wise.

REVIEW: Fresh Snow - WON

Laura Kerry

Who are these people?

That’s the question that sprang to mind at the beginning of Fresh Snow’s EP, WON. Covering a wide, unpredictable range, it changes from droning, noise-rock guitar to cinematic strings and jazzy horn blasts. And that’s just the first track.

WON, Fresh Snow’s sophomore album (not including single releases), is mostly instrumental, a genre that probes the mystery of authorship more than most. Lacking human voices and the words that express their meaning, instrumental music leaves us only with gestures to convey idea, genre, and ultimately, an image of its creator. But, as the opener “King Twink Rides Again” shows, and the rest of the album emphasizes, the music here doesn’t clarify the image—it complicates it.

Fresh Snow is like a boggart, that monster in Harry Potter that changes shape to resemble the worst fear of its viewer—only instead of fears, this music shifts its shape according to sonic influences. Depending on the moment and the listener, the album can sound like krautrock, metal, avant-garde, or even pop. Between the four members of the band and their diverse tastes (Andy Lloyd on bass and keys, Brad Davis on guitar and keys, Jon Maki on drums, and Tim Condon on keys and various other things), odds are that someone has listened to it and allowed it to seep in. Formed in a dive bar in Toronto, Fresh Snow was born from improvisation, which might explain the unexpected shapes that settle after the boggart stops whirling.

On an album full of contrasts, one of the starkest—the boggart before and after the riddikulus charm, if you will (I’m done with the embarrassingly specific Harry Potter references now, I promise)—is between the two songs with vocals. “Proper Burial,” the second track, features Carmen Elle of DIANA, whose pretty yet haunting voice carries a clean melody over a bouncy bass line. Though the band’s darker tendencies eventually dilute the sweetness with droning guitars and a clanging sound that brings to mind heavy machinery moving in a large factory, it is still the album’s most accessible, pop-oriented tune.

Singing returns in a much different form on the final song (a sprawling, almost 11-minute piece) when, at around the 4:45 mark, guest vocalist Damian Abraham lets out the scream that he has honed to perfection in his band Fucked Up. Screaming is not my favorite device in music, to be honest, but set over tightly repetitive chord progressions with an interlude of some shimmering strings, the gritty cry of “It melts away” exudes an earnestness that quickly won me over.

All of WON delivers on its title, for that matter. Often confounding but always intriguing, Fresh Snow is never exactly what you expect. For a band that sometimes wears masks while performing, the question of cementing a picture in your mind is irrelevant and likely impossible. What’s more important is that Fresh Snow compels you to keep trying.