Available on: Secretly Canadian LP

You might know the story of jj by now, but if you don’t… Last year the Sincerely Yours label, home of Swedish bands the Tough Alliance and Air France, start selling 7″s on their website by jj – no information, just blood-splattered sleeve art and songs that fit with the label’s Balearic aesthetic but provided a more mournful counterpart to Air France’s postcard pop. Like Air France, jj’s songs are soaked in nostalgia, but it’s a nostalgia that reflects dissatisfaction with the present more than the joy of the past, turning to the purest pop (such as on their take on Lil Wayne’s ‘Lollipop’, titled ‘Ecstasy’) to express great sadness. More information began to surface on the band following the release of their first album, jj n°2, and now they’re no longer anonymous – they recently played live, touring with the xx, and their names are apparently Joakim Benon and Elin Kastlander.

Here they release jj n°3, their second album and their first for new label Secretly Canadian. They also now have a PR, and according to them the deal with this album is that it’s a winter/spring record, in the same way jj n°2 was a summer one. It’s concise, at nine short tracks, and opens with another Lil Wayne tribute – the candle-lit, piano-led ‘My Life’, which flips Wayne’s “I’m grindin’ ’til I die” line from the song of the same name into what sounds like a reference to looking for love instead of hustling, before closing on a refrain of the chorus from ATC’s ‘Around the World’, where Elin sounds like she’s singing simply out of fear of silence. It’s far from the best song here, but it is one of the most memorable, and leads nicely into ‘And Then’, which is classic jj with sunburst strings and maracas.

Some reviews of this album focus on the fact it’s not as good as jj no.2, and maybe it’s not, but I can’t help thinking that if jj had simply called this short record an EP – an extension rather than a follow-up – then it would be viewed as a triumph. There are some incredibly beautiful moments on this record – the music box-in-stereo intro for ‘Let Go’, for example, is more touching in its nostalgia for childhood summers than your average Ghost Box CD, and when Elin sings “I’ll never be alone again / ’cause I’ve got a friend” it’s close to devastating as a moment of untempered optimism in the context of this sad album.

Nostalgia is, obviously, all over this record – as well as the previously mentioned examples, there’s the Swedish football commentary in ‘Into the Light’, the coral whistles of ‘Light’, the excited, first love opening of ‘You Know’ (“I don’t know why / I think I’m falling for you / I just found out / I don’t know what to do”) – but rarely do artists pull it off as naturally, and with as much composure in their end of the night (or end of the summer) sadness as jj. This is a band whose music is fragile, often pastel-toned, and maybe even disposable on the surface (as proved here by Paul ‘Band of the Day’ Lester, whose investment in music can’t have gone beyond “checked myspace, skipped through album, made judgment” since the last Style Council album), but who reward repeated listening in a way that very few other artists around can.

Tom Lea