Kings Of Convenience - Peace Or Love (2021) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

After a 12-year hiatus, the Norwegian duo returns with an especially airbrushed take on easy-listening pop. At their best, the Kings sound deceptively effortless, but the facade is sometimes too smooth.

Europeans have mastered the art of taking it easy in a way that elicits American envy—how else to explain the plethora of hygge coffee-table books, the popularity of travel vloggers, and the eternal appeal of striped bateau shirts? In that sense, to describe Kings of Convenience’s work as easy listening isn’t disparaging. It’s simply an acknowledgement that the Norwegian duo’s music, particularly Peace and Love, the follow-up to 2009’s Declaration of Dependence, makes languid, pleasant pop seem deceptively effortless; the album is so smooth that its seams are barely visible. The record’s 11 tracks are a Quaalude dream, a set of gossamer songs so refined that they take on sedative properties.

Peace and Love is, more than anything, evocative: of early-aughts indie pop (Feist duets on the tracks “Love Is a Lonely Thing” and “Lonely Country”), yachting as a lifestyle, bossa nova, the soundtrack to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Chad & Jeremy’s “A Summer Song.” If songs can sound the way sea breezes feel, or like an iced coffee in a piazza, these do. Which makes it even more confounding that the duo of Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye recorded this album five times. “It’s very, very hard to make something sound simple,” Bøe says in the record’s press release—a very, very Norwegian understatement.

TRACKLIST

1. Kings Of Convenience - Rumours
2. Kings Of Convenience - Rocky Trail
3. Kings Of Convenience - Comb My Hair
4. Kings Of Convenience - Angel
5. Kings Of Convenience - Love Is A Lonely Thing
6. Kings Of Convenience - Fever
7. Kings Of Convenience - Killers
8. Kings Of Convenience - Ask For Help
9. Kings Of Convenience - Catholic Country
10. Kings Of Convenience - Song About It
11. Kings Of Convenience - Washing Machine



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