Faces Down

1	Dead Passengers 4:23
2	You Know So Well 4:15
3	Sleep on Needles 4:45
4	Suffused With Love 2:51
5	Side Two 4:37
6	Modern Nature 3:36
7	Virtue and Wine 5:21
8	On and Off Again 5:06
9	No One's Gonna Come 4:39
10	All Luck Ran Out 4:25
11	Things You Call Fate 9:21
12	Rosebud Bonus Track 4:07

Barnes & Noble

With an amalgam of moony Nick Drake-inspired folk-jazz and bright Bacharach-indebted pop flourishes, the U.S. debut of 19-year-old Norwegian Sondre Lerche is a welcome surprise. While his contemporaries ply particle-board pop with IKEA-like precision (that's your Aqua, your M2M, et. al.), Lerche's vision of the perfect song is moodier and more contradictory. The most upbeat tunes, produced with more than a nod to '60s AM conventions, carry gloomy lyrical payloads, as on the sunny opener, "Dead Passengers," and Lerche's tender years belie world-weary wisdom on songs like "Virtue and Wine": "Virtue and wine cannot help you swim/ Pain and sorrow must come/ If you go." String arrangements by High Llama Sean O'Hagan lend a lushness to the proceedings, with unobtrusive programming for that 21st-century edge. But the touchstones here -- Drake, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright -- and his confessed admiration for Cole Porter are enough to pique the interest of mature pop fans (some old enough to be Sondre's parents), and Sondre Lerche delivers on that promise. Mark Schwartz

All Music Guide

Though he was born in the 1980s, Norwegian singer/songwriter Sondre Lerche seems to want nothing to do with the electronica and pop-punk sounds that fascinate most of his contemporaries; his songs -- with their rich and folky chord progressions, cheesy synth tones, quietly recorded drums, and swooning strings -- sound for all the world like products of the 1960s. Which is by no means a bad thing, especially when he's channeling the Beatles ("You Know So Well") or revisiting Tin Pan Alley ("Modern Nature," in duet with the winning Lillian Samdal) or getting all sentimental and bossa nova ("Virtue and Wine"). The song titles, you will have noticed, do not necessarily bode well for the lyrics; Lerche is not a native English speaker, and his sense of idiom isn't as developed as it probably should be if he's going to write songs in that language (sample couplet: "Once I believed we could approach this/Now I have faith placed in the things you call fate"). But the lyrics are not always embarrassing, and the melodies and arrangements are consistently attractive and involving enough to make up for it when they are. Rick Anderson

Rolling Stone

The mix of wit, depth and kicky Sixties pop in Faces Down provides another bright spot from up north. Mark Healy

Rolling Stone Online

...Elegant, infectious melodies, vivid lyrics that put many a native English-speaking wordsmith to shame and a voice as mellow as a Mallomar...