Tommy Tokyo (or Tommy Lorange Ottosen as he is known in his native Norway) has the kind of unruly and angry beard that a prospector from the great American Gold Rush would have killed for, so naturally he and his moribund band of misfits and Norwegian émigrés pan for only the crabbiest, melancholy nuggets to be found in ‘dem der hills. As you can imagine from the title alone, ‘Smear Your Smiles Back On’ is a wordy and curiously baroque take on the bleak and murderous passion plays more traditionally associated with artists like Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, and perhaps more recently hurdy-gurdy, drum-carrying, horn pumping, cello busting ‘art’ ensembles like Arcade Fire and Domino signings, The Wild Beasts. It’s not always easy, it’s not always pretty but tracks like ‘Exploitation Picket Fence’ – with their lumpy, plodding rhythms, anxious vocals and whispering strings – are a strange and slightly illicit pleasure. In fact the experience is not unlike harbouring sexual fantasies about your own grandmother: it’s cruelly unexpected, terrifically unacceptable yet curiously compelling all the same. But it’s not all heavy going. ‘The Circle Must Be Broken’ combines the giddy vocal excesses of the none-too-secretly Canadian Anthony Hegarty and the swooning, 50s excesses of a ‘Drive-In’ David Bowie. In fact fracturing family ties, rifle shots and crying yourself to sleep at night because you long to be different have seldom sounded this chipper.
A terrific album, teeming with imagery, buzzing with criminal intentions, weeping with self-pity and scratching into vinyl one of the prettiest musical tragedies this side of Steve Harley’s ‘Sebastian’.