Sondre Lerche's New Work Packs Punch

03/05/07 8:00pm

by Elizabeth Chorney-Booth (CHARTattack)

Sondre Lerche has done a lot of growing up in the past half-dozen years. When his Faces Down debut came out in 2002, the then 19-year-old came off as a studious pop prodigy who was more concerned with chord structure and heady lyrics than youthful good times.

Since then, Lerche has wrestled with international critical acclaim, dabbled in crooner-style jazz, got married, moved part-time to New York City (while still keeping a place in his hometown of Bergen, Norway) and, most importantly, has learned to lighten up.

Lerche's newly released Phantom Punch is his fourth full-length effort and by far his most raucous. In the past, Lerche has worked in a very solitary way, but with the new album he made a conscious decision to expand his music by reaching out to the musicians who back him up. Nowadays Lerche sees himself more as the leader of his band, The Faces Down, than purely as a solo artist standing in front of a group of hired guns.

"The writing process is still pretty isolated, so it's definitely a process that I go through alone. But with Phantom Punch I definitely had the band very much in mind for a lot of the songs when I wrote them, much more than before. I wanted to write songs that could provoke the band and bring out an energy from each musician and also for myself in a way that I hadn't done before."

Keeping the band at the front of his mind meant that Lerche had to think of the songs outside of the context of the studio as well. If he was going to write for the band, he had to think about how the songs would translate to a live setting. Phantom Punch's more physical vibe didn't just grow out of Lerche's own upbeat energy, it also came from his vision of how he'd perform the songs on stage.

"There's definitely a sense with this record that I wanted to have the energy that you have in a live show," Lerche says. "When we started rehearsing the songs, I wanted to try to limit ourselves as much as we could and have all the arrangements happen within the band.

"There's very little going on outside of the band on the record, which makes it very natural when we play live. We did a few shows in New York and L.A. right before we went into the studio, just to preview the new material, so we could get it into our system. A gig is worth more than 10 rehearsals to a band or any musician. And that's what the record is about."

Lerche's only Canadian date on his upcoming North American tour is an April 2 performance at Toronto's Mod Club.