Music, Style & Culture

| Magazine : Online : Radio : Mobile

Kleerup - Kleerup

Album Reviews

Can he maintain the brilliance of 'With Every Heartbeat' across an album of his own? Well... not really.

Kleerup is the Swedish producer behind one of the best number one singles of the decade, Robyn's stunning 'With Every Heartbeat' (included here and credited as Kleerup feat. Robyn), but can he maintain this brilliance across an album of his own? Well... not really.

As an intro 'Hero' is brilliant. An instrumental save for the choral chants that lead the track out and accompanied by the gentle pulsating keyboards. Yet, when he's not overtly using the talents of a fellow Swede on vocals a fair bit of Kleerup's music can sound a little bit samey. 'Tower Of Trellick' for instance, could be any vaguely bleepy electro from the past few years. It just fades into the background after 90 seconds of trying to listen to it.

Back to the good though – the Tityo featuring 'Longing For Lullabies' is worth your time as is 'On My Own Again', but the real gem here is 'Until We Bleed' which has it's vocals supplied by the blog friendly Lykke Li. To be honest where Li is involved we expected nothing less than something really quiet special, it's a little bit bleepy but this is supplemented really nicely by the strings and functions as an example of what 'Kleerup' does right. When the classical and the electro combine he's really rather brilliant. Yet he seems to ditch this angle fairly early on in the record. Overall there's the nagging feeling that (at least from a pop viewpoint) Kleerup is producer first and artist second, highlighted by the fact that here at least he's very much being carried by his guest vocalists. Sure the aforementioned opener and 'The End', (which has the feel more of an instrumental post-punk track) work really well, but apart from that it's the songs that say 'feat.' somewhere that are the ones that warrant repeated listens.

Still, as a debut effort from Kleerup it's better than either Timbaland or Ronson's attempts at crossing over from producer to artist. Yet you need go no further than a handful of these songs, or you'll just find yourself skipping most of the album. Yet if you don't have 'With Every Heartbeat' yet then this is the perfect excuse to revisit a perfect slice of pop and maybe to investigate some of what else Sweden has to offer the pop world too. Rating: 6/10