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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

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ANNIKA NORLIN - SHOWERING IN PUBLIC [5.71] And now let's slip into something a bit more uncomfortable...

Joshua Minsoo Kim: "Showering in Public" doesn't need to be heard more than once. It's like a heart-to-heart you have with a friend, where the weight of every emotion and shared story remains with you forever; you don't recall the event every time you see this person, but it shapes how you think about them, interact with them, love them. "Showering in Public" achieves this effect because of the premise from which it's derived: a year-long project where Annika Norlin and Jens Lekman communicated with each other via monthly-released singles. As such, this is personal and lyric-heavy, less a piece of music than a letter read aloud. Norlin spends the duration of the song tracing the history of her distaste for showering in public, and how it's a result of perverts both young and old trying to see her and other females in the nude. It's poignant and funny and quotidian all at once, the instrumentation solely functioning as necessary accompaniment to qualify this as song-like. Tracks like these display how making a song allows for a valuable distancing -- something with which one can approach specific feelings and ideas that may otherwise be too difficult to tackle head-on. [6]

Anthony Easton: Norlin's details and her po-faced humour make the banal impositions of misogynist culture precise and clear. Sometimes it becomes a little plodding, but you feel churlish for pointing it out because of the nature of her subjects. This one isn't as interesting as some of the songs from Hello Saferide, but it has some great lines. [8]

Vikram Joseph: Using an idiosyncratic but relatable experience such as showering in public as a tool for stringing memories together, creating an oblique window into the narrator's soul: a really good idea. Those memories literally all being of pervy boys/men at school: makes a point, but stifles the song's emotional range. Patronising the listener by explaining the concept of the song ("This is me recapping my life when it comes to showering in public"): not good. It almost feels like improv songwriting -- the verse structure is malleable, lines frequently don't scan -- but Norlin lacks the humour to sell it. The spare guitar backing could have worked on a Julien Baker song, but feels incongruous and tepid here. +1 point for teaching me how to pronounce the Swedish city of Göteborg, though. [4]

Alfred Soto: The details are precise and painful, the musical elements non-existent. [3]

Katherine St Asaph: Uncomfortable nakedness as metaphor for uncomfortable self-revelation appeals to many singer-songwriters, for obvious reasons -- think Kristin Hersh titling her memoir Paradoxical Undressing, after the phenomenon in hypothermia. The first verse of "Showering in Public" starts to go there, but it soon becomes clear that no, this will just be about literal showering in public. And the starchy vocal, singsong "Tom's Diner" affect, and banal detail for detail's sake ("one of the bathrooms was broken -- it had a sign that said 'broken'") make it hard to really care. [3]

Ian Mathers: Norlin is one of those songwriters who can take something so quotidian and personal and start addressing in a way that, even if you know how good she is at this mode, seems like it's going to be inconsequential or silly, only by the end to have thoroughly captured something real and moving and sometimes very dark. It's not the only good way to write a song, but it's an impressive one when it's properly executed, partly because it would be so easy for the results to fall flat. [7]

Iain Mew: My most mortifying experience in my Singles Jukebox career came through picking Hello Saferide's "Arjeplog" for Amnesty 2009. I'm only just about at the point where I can link to it now; read between the lines of my comment there and you can see how deeply I was bothered by the way so many people gathered round a reading of it as an uncomfortable intimacy simulation that was a long way away from mine. I related deeply to her, and that was that. Now here I am picking one of her songs as the one that moved me most in the year again, and given that it's about a lifetime's experience of predatory men being supported by structural misogyny I can't directly relate. In an ironic twist, it's also framed as intimate correspondence -- Annika and Jens Lekman have spent 2018 exchanging musical letters, with this one making the most of that concept. Something else is obviously happening. Feeling right there in the moment with her is part of how it works after all. But there's explanation in a key line on the last Hello Saferide album too: "where we come from, we drink or we suppress" to which I can only mentally add "...and I very rarely drink." The thing that makes "Showering in Public" for me is its understatement: Annika Norlin's elliptical approach, the wry asides, the way the gut-punch "the paper published the news with a fun caricature" has so much power through implication. The closing section addressed more specifically to Jens, the quilted jacket in Göteborg, becomes an unusual kind of emotional climax. The stark music does a lot of the work of filling in everything left unsaid, but ultimately the way of writing out feelings in a studiedly offhand style and then moving rapidly and desperately on feels incredibly real and personal. I'm overdue on writing to two dear friends and I have things to say that I don't know where to start with, but I do know that the next step after carefully pouring out your soul is obviously to fill in niceties about the weather. I'm so happy to hear someone else get it. [9]

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