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Often when critics approach Eva Dahlgren, the first step towards her art is the texts, the words, the peculiar ability to clearly describe the elusive, the metaphysical. As an observer, it is easy to stare blindly at this undeniable masterful quality. All this is also on her fifteenth album “Evalution”. But I want to focus on something else in this review. Not because of what it says, but because of how it says it. I want to rewrite the voice.
On the Swedish pop scene, it was ubiquitous when it was at its commercial peak in the turn of the eighties to the nineties. His airy alt opened the doors to a multitude of other singers whose main common denominator was that their voices flourished in the lower registers. Lisa Nilsson, Irma and Idde Shultz, Rebecka Törnqvist, CajsaStina Åkerström, Kayo and many more released in connection with the greatest hits “Free World 1989” and “A pale blonde’s heart” which took to Sweden as an unusually deep feminine song. Compare today, where Seinabo Sey and Amanda Bergman alone represent the lowest notes in a soprano-dominated Swedish pop band. When Eve was queen, all blows fell an octave.
So “I sing the light” Since 2016, she now works with producer Johannes Berglund, who was a child when she was a pop star. That she has her voice as a muscular memory of that time is not a wild assumption. The way they both chose to use it in “Evaluation” is also a sign that someone (or both!) Knows that it has special weight, no less symbolic. With commissions for Jenny Wilson, The Knife and Amason on her CV, among others, Berglund has a solid experience in approaching singing as an instrument of special value in production.
This is how Eva Dahlgren’s voice also appears here. In stock, with effects that sound both like carriers of words, in dialogue with itself. The idea goes to Linda Perhac’s singing experiment in the 1970s, the Cocteau Twins and the brand new The Japanese House. Ambition can be most clearly realized on the most minimalist of the album’s nine tracks. As in “We never were heroes”, drunk in the sun, or “The Birds”, whose seemingly simple melody finally unfolds into a seven and a half minute long electronic rhythm.
Coming from an artist who claims he doesn’t listen to music at all and who has used the words “commercial suicide” as a motto in his album work, that sound is riveting in sync with the spirit of the age. The fingertip feel is similar to some of the really big pop. Like David Byrne or Bowie, who remains just as creatively interesting even after 60. Dahlgren follows the same path.
Here you will also find you have to say things that are not so impressive. Kent’s brother “Taxi” will fit very well on the P4 playlists, it already sounds at least ten years old. Messy “I am sun” also has something dated, and other options are well conventional. But the prevailing sentiment of “Evaluation” is one of the careful and confident work of a musical creator who, three decades after his greatest successes, finds himself at a new artistic peak. Less an evaluation of what has been, more a movement towards what it can become.
Best track: “The birds”
Read the interview with Eva Dahlgren and more texts by Sara Martinsson
