Even if Jesper Norda has named his latest album “April Archives Collection No 1” I feel that it was perfect for me to get into his music now, in the beginning of the autumn. Beutiful, safe, a little lonely, disquieting, calm but yet dramatic.

The first track “Tomorrow You’ll Be Forgiven…” is magic to me. A Satie-sounding minimalistic piano figure, a simple, but beautiful song melody, Jesper’s dark, low-voiced vocals and “…but tomorrow you will have your teeth knocked out” which feels just like a hit right in the solarpexus, in the middle of the warm safe ambience.

“April Archives Collection No 1” is a compilation of three of Jesper Norda’s earlier EP:s, 12 songs with only Jesper and his piano and sometimes a simple drum machine. No excesses, as simple as possible, but it never gets uninteresting. The melodies are not revolutionizing but set inside my head, both from the vocals and the piano figures. I hear David Sylvain, Leonard Cohen, Roger Waters in different contexts, but in the end his own unique character.

You can find Jesper Norda on his site or on Myspace. You can also listen on Spotify.

Tomorrow you´ll be forgiven but tonight you will have your teeth knocked out
Lets go to a place infected with truth and resist with all our hearts

A year and a half ago I wrote a post on Brian Kramer and his live album from Club Stampen. This time, though, he’s all alone. It’s just about Brian, his acoustic guitar(s) and you. As close and intimate as it gets.

He sneaks away into the Mississippi delta, he takes a tour to Amsterdam, he let the blues take a stroll along childhood lanes and relationships and even have a look at an old pocket watch. It’s naked and straight on and no excessive outbreaks. And just like with the other album, I feel a nice mellow warmth, and especially in the more melodic storytelling songs, I get a feeling of John Hiatt, who also have a special way of spreading warmth around him.

Here are two tracks from “Myself and Mine”:

Journey to the Delta
My Precious Stone

You can find Brian Kramer on his Myspace page and on his site

Today I’ll present a new colleague here on Meadowmusic, Thomas Nävsjö. First up for him is Steget:

My first post here concerns Steget, the duo from Gothenburg, who on their latest album “Förändrar Allting” create beautiful, stylistically pure piano pop filled with emotions. The voice  of Mathilda Sjöström is wonderfully accompanied by the piano of Nils Dahl and with the ballad “Jag Skulle Dö För Dig” they have come up with a duet that touches me in a way no other has since Ratata/Frida or Peter Gabriel/Kate Bush back in the eighties.

You’ll find Steget on Myspace and the entire album is available on Spotify. Here’s “Baby Baby Baby” from the album:

Baby Baby Baby

Pull A Star Trip. Singer/songwriter with a couple of adreneline injections, or hardcore with acoustic guitars? They have been compared with Dashboard Confessional, which I can agree with to some extent, but here’s an extra intensity and energy which seems endless. And even if it’s not at all the same genre, I can’t help thinking about The Proclaimers and foremost their “I’m gonna be (500 Miles)”, in the energy and the interaction. Maybe somewhere around all this you can find Pull A Star Trip’s music.

In 2009 Pull A Star Trip released their first album “E-Vasion Inn”. Here are two tracks from the album:

Countenance vs. Fingerprints
LA Travel Guide

You can find Pull A Star Trip on Myspace and you can listen to “E-Vasion Inn” on Spotify.

The music coordinator for the British drama series Sparks on Channel 4, Alex Hancock, has taken a different approach for the selection of music for the series. He has asked the songwriters among the viewers to send in their own contributions, well, anyone can participate. And from this material he then chooses songs for some special scenes.

When this started a little more than a year ago, before the third season, they received thousands of songs, and for the first occasion a song from the Swedish singer/songwriter Desireé Duvringe was chosen. The song’s name is “Automation” and you can listen to it here, and here you can see how the scene ended up.

The song became very popular among the viewers, a singel was released in the autumn and Desireé is now working on following up on all the interest around “Automation”. You can find her on her Myspace page.
Here are two new songs you can listen to:

It’s Not Easy
Behind Your Eyes