Coda.fm

Super Extra Gravity

by The Cardigans

• Listen to a preview now
• Buy it at Amazon.com

Sweden's the Cardigans broke big in America in 1996 with First Band on the Moon and the hit "Lovefool." A slippery, slick pop tune, the song was also unmistakably twisted, as vocalist Nina Persson described a desperate, submissive affair in honey-flecked tones and happy-day hooks. The dichotomy was a neat little joke that went right over a lot of merrily nodding heads. A decade later on Super Extra Gravity, the band still likes to play with expectations of what a pop band is supposed to be. But while the melodic camouflage for Persson's dour lyrics once made for an effective disguise, Gravity struggles to maintain the illusion. The music here is self-consciously ambitious, constantly reshuffling and losing its momentum, leaving Persson in charge of connecting each song's too-disparate parts. It's a task for which her Chrissie-Hynde-meets-Harriet-Wheeler voice is not well-suited. "Drip Drop Teardrop," for instance, needs either a belter to accentuate the song's jagged edges or a chanteuse to smooth it out, and Persson can do neither. There are pieces of songs that still rope us in. The chorus of "Little Black Cloud," for instance, generates an exuberant energy that matches Persson's tale of a girl spinning and dancing her way toward a vaguely sinister conclusion, while "In the Round" mines an appealingly sparse and slow guitar drawl. However, the pieces don't add up to a convincing whole, and while this album is never quite boring, Gravity tries a bit too hard and ends up an interesting misfire. --Matthew Cooke