Pitchfork

Loney, Dear, aka Emil Svanängen, is finally getting a commercial foothold in America. After whetting our appetites with Loney, Noir, his fourth record, he gets a U.S. release for another rustic variation on sugar-sweet Swedish pop, a song cycle named Sologne, France's pond-mottled approximation of Walden. A sort of refuge from the city, Sologne neatly fits the album's mood of willful naivete and olden-day romance and dreamy solitude.

Thoreau via Sweden via Sub Pop? The welfare state's Bright Eyes? The formulas come close, but they can't quite encompass Loney, Dear's vision of richly layered, souped-up folk. On a mixtape, the Svanängen's sweet nothings would flow seamlessly into, frankly, anything by their labelmates the Shins. Yet Svanängen isn't crafting the tender poetry of suburbia. Instead, his album begins in an unabashedly pastoral mode, squeezing the dimensions of a rolling-hills epic into "The Battle of Trinidad and Tobago", which unfolds, in three-and-a-half minutes, like a cleverly abridged take on "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda". Hailing from the countryside of Svanängen's imagination, "A Band" and the syncopated "Le Fever" have the same rural airs.

But even Thoreau slogged back to the metropolis. Svanängen returns for closure. Like one of the high-tech ballads in Belle and Sebastian's catalog, "The City, The Airport" skips along with the Scots' trademark blend of energy and ennui, racing below a wilderness of melody. Delicate, always on the verge of shattering, Svanängen's whisper echoes the trembling falsetto of Stuart Murdoch, when he chants "the city, I don't want another life that's killing me," lingering on the vowels. The smoky sax and flimsy keyboards lend the song body without sacrificing its intimate, homemade feel. In these long goodbyes to urban emptiness, the swell of emotional momentum, as more and more sounds suavely drop into the mix, marks Sologne as a marvel of lo-fi artistry.

Obviously Svanängen knows how to mount a crescendo. (Everyone who heard "I Will Call You Lover Again" and "Carrying a Stone" from Loney, Noir will remember this.) If the closing song "Won't You Do?" is this record's soothing denouement, then "I Lose It All" works as the climax, a hunk of ice that snowballs into a hurtling boulder, as pianos tumble upstage, distortion buzzes downstage, snares shuffle, and the whole kitchen sink overthrows an unassuming drums-and-strums arrangement. Track after track, Loney, Dear coaxes drama out of these songlets, trading the spartan rawness of the usual do-it-yourself fare for a brilliantly compact sense of spectacle. He wraps the ups and downs of a whirlwind romance into tiny packages. You're left hungry, fully certain that 34 minutes-- let alone five-- will never be enough of this very, very good thing.