There’s one thing that simply can’t be denied about Ebbot Lundberg, erstwhile Soundtrack Of Our Lives frontman, it’s that, over the past twenty years or so, he has proven time and time again that he knows how to write a killer tune. For The Ages To Come is no exception, and features some of his best work yet.
The folksy title track sounds like something you would get if Roy Harper and Syd Barrett went on a picnic in the countryside together, full of rustic charm and innocent ruminations on life (“Save another whale, save another grace, save another moment trying to save your face“) before the magnificent ‘Backdrop People‘ kicks in. It contains all the joyful abandon of a Mikal Cronin record and a chorus that recalls Foo Fighters in their finest moments.
Other than ‘Backdrop…’, Lundberg only really ventures into the heavier side of things on one more occasion, with ‘Don’t Blow Your Mind‘, a song that pays credence to classic seventies rock, perhaps even momentarily dipping its toes into prog’s murky waters. Lyrically, sometimes the rhymes are somewhat clumsy (“You tried to take me for a ride, now all you feel is suicide“), but really it’s of little consequence, as the much admired Swede has long been recognised more for his compositional skills than his literary ones, and so the trend continues.
The rest of For The Ages To Come is…well…it’s nice. My old English teachers would not be pleased, for they went to great lengths to tell us never to use ‘nice’ as an adjective, but never has the word been more apt for an album review. It’s like you’ve gone to a psychiatrist with a brain full of personal problems and he or she has given you a mind massage. It’s splendidly atmospheric, its sleepy undercurrent conjuring mental images of a snowy landscape, like a Tim Burton fantasy movie, while a log fire burns and the children take their slumber. Some songs are almost like lullabies – ‘I See Forever‘, for some reason, put me in mind of Justin Hayward‘s War Of The Worlds contribution ‘Forever Autumn‘, and ‘In Subliminal Clouds‘, comes across as something like a lighter hearted Sparklehorse.
This is the Swede’s third ‘solo’ album, after half a dozen with his esteemed band, and, pleasingly, it is arguably also his most cohesive. A friend of mine once told me that he viewed Lundberg as one of those artists that it is simply impossible to dislike, and this record does little to dispel such heady accolades, for it is a fine album indeed.
For The Ages To Come is out now on Haldern Pop Recordings.
