My Life Is Like A Symphony

The Last Hurrah!! “The Ballad of Billy and Lilly (parts one and two)”

There is a strange Rorschach-blot quality to the Last Hurrah!!’s debut album Spiritual Non-Believers. I’ve been listening to the record regularly for two weeks, and every spin reveals a new detail or association. It’s a record that somehow manages to be rather simple and straight forward — it is basically a collection of catchy Norwegian folk songs — and wonderfully complex and ambitious. There are only three cuts on the album: An obscure Norwegian psychedelic pop cover at the start, a 31-minute suite about a doomed love affair at the center and a gorgeous bossanova-shoegazer-surf-twee-krautrock melange at the conclusion. It’s all fascinating and engaging, but the main attraction is the epic, which cycles through dozens of hooks and musical ideas in a way that is both surprising and intuitive. At various points I hear echoes of Joanna Newsom, Wilco, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Joni Mitchell, the Fiery Furnaces and Animal Collective, but the overall effect is ultimately rather distinct in its style and charm.

I’ve been obsessing over this record for days, and I still feel as though I’m only just scratching the surface in my understanding of it. I heard the album finale at least a dozen times before noticing it was not sung in English. I heard the second part of the “Billy and Lilly” suite even more times before I fully registered this brilliant line in its chorus: “Hit me, hit me, with a bottle or a stone / as long as you are physical I’ll know that I’m not alone.” I’m still picking up on the nuances of transitions between sections, interesting rhythms and tonalities, bits where harmonies seem to fall slightly out of phase. This is a rich, immensely rewarding record and I hope to write about it in greater detail down the line. For now I’m still just enjoying the fact that I still haven’t fully learned all its twists and turns.

Buy the full album for $2.99 from Amazon.