This week we have the pleasure of presenting you with this amazing session with Glen and Marketa from The Swell Season, visiting our friends at the last.fm/discover studios. Back with a new album called Strict Joy, Swell Season are still riding high off the success of their self-titled debut, and the Once movie soundtrack that spawned the Oscar-winning single Falling Slowly. Glen and Marketa perform that song and two new ones: Low Rising and In These Arms.
Click “Play” to watch this exclusive session with The Swell Season.
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Maybe it’s the circumstance – The Swell Season’s Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova were a real-life couple before they played one in the movie “Once” and subsequently broke up just as the accolades, including an Oscar for best original song, started rolling in. Or maybe it’s that Hansard’s weary delivery of raw, introspective lyrics fit perfectly with Irglova’s delicate harmonies and the spare, acoustic folk backdrop.
In either case, The Swell Season’s latest effort, “Strict Joy” (Anti-), shows how simple arrangements can still communicate volumes about life’s complexities. Hansard’s vocals and compositions are uniquely flexible, summoning Damien Rice’s vocal pain one moment (“Back Broke”) and R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck (“High Horses”) the next, sliding between acoustic Radiohead orchestration (“The Verb”) and current country (“In These Arms,” which any number of Nashville singers should be lining up to cover right now).
Hansard’s heat-and-devastation ebb-and-flow is fully on display on the Van Morrison-like opener, “Low Rising,” and he is the album’s focal point. Irglova’s backing vocals are essential, however, austere and haunting in contrast to Hansard’s lacerating transparency. When Irglova sings lead on a couple of heart-breakers, “Fantasy Man” and “I Have Loved You Wrong,” she brings a mixture of stately dignity and fragile beauty. The lack of melodrama is refreshing, given that many of these songs reflect on the couple’s two-year romance and eventual break-up. Its flickering embers are extinguished on the final song, “Back Broke,” with Hansard singing barely above a whisper over Irglova’s piano and some Spanish-flavored guitar. If “Once” was an album about falling (slowly) in love, “Strict Joy” is about the bittersweet aftermath.
TRACKLIST
1. Low Rising
2. Feeling The Pull
3. In These Arms
4. The Rain
5. Fantasy Man
6. Paper Cup
7. High Horses
8. The Verb
9. I Have Loved You Wrong
10. Love That Conquers
11. Two Tongues
12. Back Broke
VIDEOS
BEST SHOTS
photo credit: adamlerner
photo credit: adamlerner
