REVIEW: Buzz artist Oh Land aims at international breakthrough

Pernille Larsen | Staff Writer

With the release of her second eponymous album, Danish electro-pop singer Oh Land and her management have lined up the big guns. She performed the first single off her self-titled album “Oh Land,” “Sun of a Gun,” on both The Late Show with David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel Live! in March. In February, she graced the cover of “Time Out New York,” who named her one of their Most Stylish New Yorkers. On the Valentine’s Day episode of the teen soap “Gossip Girl,” her track “We Turn It Up,” was set to images of the Big Apple.

In short, Oh Land is about to blow up. After signing with Epic Records, daughter company of Sony, the artist born Nanna Øland Fabricius relocated from her native Copenhagen to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. For her international debut, Oh Land enlisted A-list producers Dave McCracken, who has worked with Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue and Depeche Mode, and Dan Carey, who has worked with La Roux, Sia and Hot Chip. The result is an adventurous yet accessible sonic endeavour sprinkled with moments of excellence.

There are potential chart-toppers aplenty on “Oh Land.” The most obvious choice is perhaps the first single, “Sun of a Gun,” an insistent banger with off-beat loops made pretty when its big glockenspiel-laced chorus sets in. Another contender is “White Nights,” whose combination of light keyboards and rumbling jungle drums culminates in a rapturous chorus, calling to mind the ethereal quirk pop of Glasser, one of 2010’s hotly tipped artists.

However, Oh Land has more than three-minute upbeat crackers in her repertoire. Her flair for the cinematic and fantastical, nurtured by a past career as a ballerina, is evident on the opening track “Perfection,” as well as on “Oh Land’s” central track, “Human.” The former contrasts plaintive strings and cascades of harp with eerie atmospherics, a beat reminiscent of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” combined with creepy lyrics. On the album’s most successful track, “Human,” lush and somber strings swivel around a steadfast beat while Oh Land sings in Björk-esque vocals about her misanthropic tendencies (“I don’t like you, human / You remind of the things I hate in me”) only to absolve us all (“I guess you’re only only only / Human”).

“Oh Land” is to a certain extent a hit-and-miss affair. When she gets it right, as on “Human,” “Perfection,” “Sun of a Gun,” “White Nights,” and “Lean,” Oh Land can be an uplifting and moving listen. Yet she eludes perfection with missteps such as the electro-disco farce in “Voodoo,” and “Helicopter,” which sounds like the theme song to a wholesome kiddie show. Other songs such as “Wolf & I” and “Rainbow” are melodic exercises in pretty and, as such, pretty superfluous.

What remains consistent throughout the album is the master class production. Oh Land manages to keep her knack for inventing new sounds (the snare drum on “Wolf & I” is the sound of McCracken’s daughter’s Velcro shoes being ripped) and dreaming up syncopated beats while also letting her producers give her songs a complementary sheen. Even in a market flooded with female-fronted (indie) electro-pop music, Oh Land has tunes catchy and worthy enough to catapult her into international stardom.