A Camp – Colonia

Album Reviews • Wednesday April 22nd, 2009 • 10:39 am

The old adage that you learn something new every day is true. Recently I learned that Nina Persson, the spritely singer of The Cardigans back during the ‘90s, is in a band called A Camp, that she used to be a figure skater, and that Colonia is actually the band’s second album, coming some eight years after their eponymous debut.

Colonia is a unique record. From songs with settings appropriate to 17th-Century balls (“The Crowning”) to duets where the singers talk to each other by name (in “Golden Teeth and Silver Medals” Persson asks, “Do you think you’re happy, Nicolai?” to which fellow Swede Nicolai Dunger replies, “I don’t know the answer, Nina.”), this is an album of unconventional flourishes and juxtapositions. To say it is designed to keep you on your toes is an understatement.

One of the tropes used several times in this album is that of using upbeat, happy-sounding music to tell a much darker story. “The Crowning” is the equivalent of a forced smile in the presence of someone you hate, as it talks about rewarding a “murderous ass” who has a “useless, ruthless head” and whose selfishness will cause “our houses [to] crumble [and] this city [to] fall.” And in “My America,” Persson talks about the allure and pull of American celebrity wasting and abusing innocent lives, all to the background of a lively, party-like sound that will set your hands clapping and your feet tapping before you know what’s hit you.

Persson still has that same lovely lilt to her voice that captured the attention of so many back when she was fronting The Cardigans. She registers appropriate amounts of emotion, inquisition and distance depending on the song, and she wafts from one rhythm to another with graceful, languid ease.

The enormous surrounding cast on this record (there are no fewer than thirteen people, Persson included, who make contributions) does a worthy job of creating an album full of ambiance. Dunger shines on his duet with Persson, former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha makes delightfully subtle additions to some of the songs, while Joan Wasser and Jane Scarpantoni weave their orchestral magic on songs like “The Weed Had Got There First,” using their violin and cello, respectively, to creating a sweeping-yet-melancholic tone.

Colonia has pleasing layers, airy vocals and enough atmospherics to get you in a good mood, but the content is quite maudlin and so in some ways the album feels like it’s playing a trick on the listener. This is not a happy album, and that’s okay—there’s beauty in dark things if you know how and where to look—but by the end it gets a little overwhelming to be enjoyed more.