David Pagmar's second album as
Montt Mardié is, for all intents and purposes, actually two albums, packaged (quite beautifully) as the two-disc set
Clocks/Pretender. Although the 20 songs contained here clock in at just over an hour, and could easily fit onto a single disc, each half has its own distinct character and conceit, and each is entirely satisfying on its own terms. Taken together they offer a bounty of tuneful and inventive pop music as rich as any that's emerged from Sweden, or anywhere, in recent memory. The loosely conceptual
Clocks could be considered the "proper" follow-up to
Mardié's debut,
Drama, although it takes most of its cues from the classic songbook pop of the pre-rock era, rather than the 1980s, and eschews synthesizers in favor of stylish brass and string arrangements, fabulously rendered by a 20-piece big band-cum-orchestra. Also dubbed "the Clocks," these musicians are integral to the record's success -- they provide the buoyant, swinging backup for an authentically brassy rendition of the 1941
Frank Sinatra standard "Let's Get Away from It All," and help make nearly every other (original) song feel just as classic and ageless, from the full-bodied horn swells behind the swaggering "Set Sail Tomorrow" to the stately string quartet flourishes accompanying "Travelers."
Mardié's gift for crafting timeless-sounding melodies is equally evident on sparer numbers like the opening piano ballad "Too Many Songs Unwritten," delivered in his searing falsetto, and the melancholy solo guitar waltz "I Will Write a Book." Each of the aforementioned songs deals, in different ways, with the central themes of romance, nostalgia, memory, and world travel, and helps to evoke a vague but potent sense of historical time and place -- the album opens with a thunderclap and a snippet of 1920s bandleader
Jean Goldkette, and has an over-arching pre-war vibe, but references to the '60s also abound in the lyrics as well as the music, from the Apollo moon landing (in the epic single "1969") and Holly Golightly to the title of the achingly lovely "How I Won the War" and the bouncy pop-soul flavor of "Birthday Boy," a re-write of
Drama's "Highschool Drama."