Lindstrøm - It's Alright Between Us as It Is (2017)

On Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s latest album, those northern disco lights are twinkling once more. Over the continuous stream of nine interlocked tracks on It’s Alright Between Us As It Is, he’s refined his love of arpeggiated synths, warm and steamy analogue bubble baths and earworm melodies into his most rounded and complete statement to date. A Norwegian based in Oslo, Lindstrøm has always made a virtue of his obsessive work ethic, turning his city centre studio (where his neighbours include friends and collaborators Prins Thomas, Todd Terje and Andre Bratten) into a factory floor for churning out monster tracks, then punching out regularly and going home to his family. This is about music being woven seamlessly into the fabric of life. The album’s title is a direct quote from one of Lindstrøm’s favourite movies, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. This Swedish arthouse classic is about looking for meaning and finding closure at the end of a long life. About reaching the special place you’ve waited for all your life. A professor asks his longtime housemaid if they could become more familiar, starting with her brushing his teeth for him. She replies they shouldn’t become too intimate: ‘it’s all right between us as it is.’ The album aggregates all the best elements from his long and varied career: the Balearic free-disco excursions of his two albums with Prins Thomas, experimental cosmic voyages in the vein of Six Cups of Rebel and 2015’s collaboration with the stellar Todd Rundgren, Runddans; shimmering electronic pop featuring vocals by American singer Grace Hall (‘Shinin’) and Sweden’s Frida Sundemo (‘But Isn't It’). ‘Bungl (Like a Ghost)’ features a stream of conscious poem by transgressive Norwegian vocalist Jenny Hval. Most of all it reveals him as a masterful mood sculptor, with heart-stopping chord changes rolling over his relentlessly uplifting beats.