Halfway through Susanne Sundfør’s sixth album, the listener stumbles across a monolith: a vast, 10-minute edifice made up of sepulchral organ, weeping strings, Abbaeseque chord changes, a lyric in which Sundfør asserts she’s barely noticed “the cosmic war raging in the sky” because she’s so darned sad about the heartless man who took off her dress, and then – five minutes in – a chamber music section that lasts three and a half minutes. Memorial, then, is fittingly titled: it’s lachrymose almost to the point of self-parody, yet utterly magnificent. Sundfør is a bona fide star in her native Norway, No 1 albums and all, and it’s completely understandable. Ten Love Songs shows a command of artpop, chilly synthpop, and that simultaneously joyous and desperate disco that seems to seep out of Scandinavia in an unending flood: it’s both appealingly direct yet perfectly thought-through. The way the bass hook in Fade Away, a straight pinch from scores of dancefloor hits before, is kept stiff and hard seems to symbolise a mood of thwarted desire. Don’t miss out on this: it’s a quite brilliant album.
