Slate gets all twee about Jens Lekman

In an article entitled, "The musical genius of Jens Lekman," Stephen Metcalf writes:

Circles square, cosmic harmonies converge, generations in comity meet. My obsession for Jens Lekman is no less intense than my daughter's. (And by intense, I mean intense: For an entire month, I could not restrain her compliantly in a car seat without playing the Jens Lekman song "You Are the Light.") A little background: Jens Lekman is a Swedish pop musician. To those of you who care, with oenophilic degrees of subtlety, about your pop music, Lekman is from Gothenburg, not Stockholm, which puts him in very good company with the Knife, Jose Gonzalez, and Soundtrack of Our Lives. (Stockholm is better known these days for the Shout Out Louds and Peter, Bjorn and John, ear-easy indie acts when compared with the Gothenburg sound, which is spikier, more introspective.) In Sweden, Lekman's a Grammy-winning, Billboard-charting star; here, he is embraced by a small subset of the vinyl-buying cognoscenti. Lekman's reception in the States has been limited by a couple of minor artistic transgressions. First, he is, yes, it's true, prone to the sort of twee self-regard that converted Wes Anderson, midcareer, from a promising filmmaker into an antique tea table. Second, his influences and affinities are instantly obvious: Stephin Merritt's drone, Morrissey's bite, Belle and Sebastian's atmospherics, with some of Jonathan Richman's wild pitch and yaw.

Let the love-in continue, y'all.  We're not really big big fans of Jens, but we certainly aren't going to try to deny his importance in the neo-New New Romanticism going on these days in pop music.

(mp3)    The Opposite of Hallelujah

Godspeed!