Wishing Well & Covers EP

We Say...

Review by Yancey Strickler

Here's what's great about Love Is All: when they cover Dire Straits' wonderful ballad "So Far Away," they don't punk it up, they don't play it with irony, they don't play it with distance. It's not by any means a faithful cover (it's close, yet they still make it their own), but the mournful sentiment behind it is unchanged and just as sincere (if not more so) than when Mark Knopfler rode it to chart success back in 1985.

"So Far Away" is the only serious moment on the Wishing Well + 5 Covers EP, an incredibly fun collection of songs that reveals kinda what we all hoped was true about Love Is All: that the Swedish kids were sweet and lively and earnest and sincere and, maybe more than anything, weirdly innocent. There's an infantilism to their music that makes them so goddamned loveable.

On their 2006 debut, Nine Times That Same Song, LIA exploded thanks to the mesh of singer Josephine Olausson's kid sister exuberance fronting James Chance-like caterwauling contortions, a sound that dabbled in no wave, pop-punk, post-punk and straight pop. "Wishing Well," the first track here and the one LIA original (it will be on their upcoming album A Hundred Things That Keep Me Up at Night, due in September), leans most heavily on those latter two, the melody very new wave and the chorus pure, glorious pop, all of it played loud and fast.

Also loud and fast is the cover of Lung Leg's before-its-time 1998 track "Kung-Fu on the Internet" (how prescient they were!). But best of breed is the just-perfect cover of the Pastels' "Simply Nothing to Be Done" and LIA taking on A Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran," which they turn into something almost Can-like with its thudding bass that sounds straight outta "Mother Sky." Josephine is particularly great here, too, vamping each note perfectly, wonderfully underselling that "I couldn't get away" line. But really it all comes down to that chorus: the original poppier than the poppiest pop, but in LIA's hands, it's just off, and amazingly so. There are hints of discord (the sax a bit sharp, the guitars not quite tuned) as the whole thing shatters and explodes and comes back together merrily, gleefully, happily, exuberantly, lovingly.