Life in the Trenches

Swedish pop cognoscenti have long pegged Gothenburg duo the Embassy as key players behind the vibrant, inventive, and aesthetically striking, unified indie pop scene which has flourished in that west coast second city over first decade of the 2000s -- in particular, as major influences on the likes of Jens Lekman (who's signed domestically to their Service imprint), Studio, and the Tough Alliance (both of whom named their own labels -- Information and Sincerely Yours, respectively -- after Embassy songs), among others. But they've hardly enjoyed the same amount of air time as their internationally hailed successors (or for that matter their similarly minded contemporaries the Radio Dept.) Life in the Trenches, the duo's first full-length release in six years, feels like a bid for that to start changing: it's a deck-clearing collection of B-sides, one-off singles, and other non-album cuts, dating from their first release (2001's Sneaky Feelings EP) through to a video track they posted to Tumblr in 2010 ("C'est La Vie"), but it works marvelously well simply as an introduction -- or a re-introduction -- to the band, and perhaps a palate primer for a new full-length which they've slyly hinted may be coming sometime in 2012 (these Swedes will have their cryptic secrets.) And Life is clearly to geared to work as an album in its own right. Sequenced for cohesion rather than chronology, it's a fine showcase for the group's many charms: cheerfully wispy acoustic strumming, tidily sequenced house beats, politely fuzzed-out twee stompers, cake-frosting synths, and sampled tropical percussion, all joined by an earnest but lackadaisical melodic sensibility and Fredrik Lindson's hushed, perennially flat vocals. The set actually benefits from its chronological diversity: although a comparison between the balmy, synth-kissed instrumental "E6" and rough-edged post-post-punk nugget "No Thanks" (both from 2001) demonstrates that the Embassy's style-spanning aesthetic was essentially fully formed from the get-go, many of the earlier pieces here (like 2002's "Make Me Sad") are on the cruder end of the spectrum, and work well juxtaposed with and scattered among newer, more polished material, such as the 2009 12" cut "St8." And it's that more recent work which stands out most vividly, especially opener/2009 A-side "You Tend to Forget," which packs all of the group's most winning sonic tricks and trinkets into an effervescently sunny four minutes. That can only be a good portent for things to come; in the mean time, enjoy this chance to (re)discover a vital missing link between the twee-dance alchemists of the early '90s (Saint Etienne; The Field Mice) and the Balearic pop/electronic wave of the late 2000s. ~ K. Ross Hoffman|