Dorks And Losers

What began as a mat­ter of con­ve­nience for Torsten Larsen and Tore Johansen has become an essen­tial part­ner­ship that is now Larsen & Furi­ous Jane. The band ini­tially formed in 2002 because Johansen had the equip­ment (micro­phone, com­puter, and avail­able space) to help Larsen record some songs.

Larsen & Furi­ous Jane has var­ied from being sim­ply a duo to at one point an eight-piece out­fit to cur­rently a quin­tet (with Mikkel Ibsen, Keld Jør­gensen, and Tom Jør­gensen). L&FJ joins a short list of crit­i­cally acclaimed Dan­ish bands like Mew, The Raveonettes, and Under Byen in bring­ing Den­mark to the fore­front of top Euro­pean musi­cal export­ing coun­tries. The band’s third LP Zen Sucker rep­re­sents the dark­est col­lec­tion of their works [I’m Glad He’s Dead (2004) and Tourist With A Type­writer (2005)] to date.

The open­ing track “Sell­ing Your­self By The Ounce” plays on the album’s depress­ing, if not ide­al­ist, title. For Larsen, the album “is a men­tal vampyre, that sucks all good will and pos­i­tive energy out of you and leaves you groan­ing with­out a chance to mas­ter any­thing but the most nec­es­sary move­ments” (press release).

Depend­ing on how you look at it, this con­cept can be both uplift­ing and uplift­ing. It’s uplift­ing because it allows your focus to revolve only around what mat­ters. The album’s min­i­mal­ist style sym­bol­izes the band’s attempt to elim­i­nate the super­flu­ous. This works well in the euphoric tracks like “A Car That Comes With The Job” and “The Peo­ple Per­son Is A Zen Sucker” that tend to high­light the bet­ter fruits or dis­tract from the worse sprites.

How­ever, it’s also dis­cour­ag­ing because the con­cept lim­its your focus to a few things while aban­don­ing the enjoy­ment of other expe­ri­ences. Regret is one of the worst things to have in life, which “A Deathbed Con­ver­sion” paints vividly in its flashing-before-your-eyes sort of way. “Fine” tells a sim­i­lar tale, albeit in the oppo­site direc­tion with the very direct “kill me now” repeat­ing over and over.

“For­bid­den Fruit” is prob­a­bly the most appro­pri­ate clos­ing song with Larsen & Furi­ous Jane remind­ing us that eter­nal plea­sure was at our grasp but ulti­mately its removal was out of our control.

Lis­ten­ing to Zen Sucker is like try­ing to have a pic­nic on a partly sunny day. There’s the prin­ci­pal joy of eat­ing and spend­ing time with loved ones out­side in a some­what nat­ural set­ting but the con­tin­ual inter­rup­tion of sun­light for con­trast­ing clouds makes for a mixed bag of emotions.

[photo via Sneak Attack Media]
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Track list:

1. Sell­ing Your­self By The Ounce
2. A Deathbed Con­ver­sion
3. Fine
4. Danc­ing Bear
5. Wid­ow­ers
6. A Car That Comes With The job
7. Viet­namese Pool Boy
8. Pangea
9. The Peo­ple Per­son Is A Zen Sucker
10. Snakes In The Grass
11. Biased And Cor­rupted
12. Local Nobil­ity
13. For­bid­den Fruit

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