Oh Laura – Release Me
It’s a shame it took something as banal as a Saab ad for the world to take notice of Oh Laura, because it lends the Swedish fivesome a beige, flat-pack, new-car-smell kind of image they really don’t deserve.
Admittedly, the band have been championed by Radio 2’s snoozemaster general, Bob Harris, and the title track from their A Song Inside My Head, A Demon In My Bed was co-written by that avatar of middle-class smugness, Sir Tim Rice – but there’s an edge of questing desperation to singer Frida Orhn’s vocals that means, in the country-tinged songstress stakes, she’s more Lucinda Williams than, say, Sheryl Crow.
When she’s not playing the role of a stay-at-home wife picking at the scabs of an atrophied relationship (It Ain’t Enough), Orhn is slathering her doleful rasp over stately, nicotine-wreathed, barfly laments such as the jaw-dropping piano-ballad Friend Like Me. You can check out both those songs here, but today we’re focusing on the afore-mentioned Saab ad track, and forthcoming single, Release Me.
A simple liberation-plea in the I Shall be Released mould, it’s full of images of fecund nature – trees, waves, flowers - straining against unnatural captivity, culminating in the wonderfully clear-eyed metaphor: “I am a glass of water longing for the ocean.”
Release Me is released by Cosmos on May 26. A Song Inside My Head A Demon In My Bed follows on June 2.
3:39 PM | 02/04/2008
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