Night Falls Over Kortedala

In the Secretly Canadian order-form that accompanies Jens Lekman's new CD, the label states, "Sweden's answer to the back massage comes in the form of this young crooner from Gothenburg." One guesses this was written about one of Lekman's twee and tender previous outings. For on Night Falls Over Kortedala, the affable songman has graduated from mere shoulder rubs to a professional relaxation package, with all the bells and whistles. Backed by snazzy horn sections and disco-fied drums, he's less a skilled masseuse than a top-of-the-line massage chair.

Yes, read in implications of a faded "human touch" -- but know that's not quite the point. Like Belle & Sebastian, Lekman has always been part personal romantic and part cultural one, which means he can pen a soft guitar tune one moment and a string-drenched ode to camp the next. And the production rise on Kortedala matches neatly with the recent shift of Stuart Murdoch and friends, whose albums Dear Catastrophe Waitress and The Life Pursuit have been more lustily orchestrated than the beloved mid-career work.

Thankfully, Lekman's increase in scale hardly means a loss of his trademark breezy intimacy. In a sense, they're actually allies. On opener "And I Remember Every Kiss," the rolling tympani and fortissimo trumpets -- suggestive of some lost Tom Jones song -- is a clever way to arrange a tune that's both a ballad about teenage love and a joke about how sappy that is. On "The Opposite Of Hallelujah" -- a dead ringer for a Catastrophe Waitress tune -- the desire to write a wise song and the knowledge that that's just silly more explicitly still. "I took my sister to the ocean," Lekman sings over bittersweet tambourines, piano and violins. "But the ocean made me feel stupid.../ And all my metaphors fell flat, down on the rocks where we sat/ She said: where you at?"

Can anyone really begrudge a guy his '70s-pop fun when he's doing it such justice in lyrics and tone? This, for example, is Lekman's version of a love song: start with a doo-wop chorus, add the softcore guitars of a Bread or America, then sing, "I saw on TV about this little kid/ Who had a pig for a pet.../ This of course has nothing to do with anything, I'm just so nervous when I'm talking to you." And "Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo" has to be the high point of this new brand of Lekman. It is essentially a rockabilly ditty reimagined as Muzak, its sock-hop melody belted out by smooth sax and gentle hand drums. In it, Lekman describes a night at a country bingo hall. One excerpt: "So this is what they do out here for fun?/ They play bingo and let their engines run/ Tonight's jackpot is a pig, hey that's criminal.../G-42... ooh, I'm going diagonal!" If that doesn't explain why the bouncy production is something to grin about, not agitate over, it's hard to say what will.