Review: Kings of Convenience’s Peace or Love Neatly Depicts the Dichotomies of Love

The album situates love as a force that works largely to bring trouble and pain.

Kings of Convenience, Peace or Love
Photo: Salvo Alibrio

From the start of their careers, Kings of Convenience have approached romance with suspicion. It was only natural, then, that the Norwegian folk-pop duo’s long-awaited fourth album, Peace or Love, would situate love as the antithesis to peace, as a force that works largely to bring trouble and pain. Twenty years after their debut album, Quiet Is the New Loud, Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe sing as if they’ve attained a certain wisdom—many of the songs here center around advice delivered in the second person—but the stain of heartbreak leaves them largely entrenched in the aloof pessimism that defined many of their early songs. One such song, 2001’s “Toxic Girl,” is about a man who resents a woman for appearing to want every man but him. The song’s matter-of-fact cynicism epitomizes an enduring self-protective stance in the band’s songs, and in their most incisive moments, it dissipates for just long enough to catch glimpses of real desire and vulnerability.

The bleakest song on Peace or Love is the Feist-assisted “Love Is a Lonely Thing,” whose title succinctly captures Kings of Convenience’s default lyrical mode of love-averse admonitions. Even more telling is the lyric “love is pain and suffering,” which is so audacious in its defeatism and simplicity that it’s almost cathartic. The song echoes the reggae-inflected “Love Is No Big Truth,” from 2004’s Riot on an Empty Street, which, much like this album, represented an impulse to intellectualize incipient romantic feelings rather than pursue them.

Of course, Kings of Convenience frame this effort as a defense, one that’s most liberating when it’s least effective, especially in the throes of heartbreak. The album’s elaborately orchestrated and kinetic outlier, “Rocky Trail,” uses a long and winding road as an appropriately well-worn image of the challenges of a long-term relationship, specifically one in which a partner has to pick up the other’s slack. The song lays the foundation for later meditations on the futility of love, and for moments of resentment that act as the push to love’s pull.

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This tension defines much of Peace or Love, tracking the familiar mental state of someone stumbling through the vagaries of dating or marriage. In a distinct change from their early work, the duo occasionally abandons the possessiveness they expressed on “Toxic Girl,” as on the breezy “Angel” (“She’s an angel though she might be slightly promiscuous”) and “Catholic Country” (“The more I know about you/The more I know I want you/The less I care about who/Was there before I found you”). On the album’s penultimate track, “Song About It,” they land on a nuanced philosophy of love, singing, “Who’s to say it’s right or it’s wrong?/All we know is that the feelings are strong.” But just when Peace or Love seems poised to settle into this maturity, it concludes with “Washing Machine,” an extended metaphor for feeling used and mistreated by a lover—a metaphor employed with more subtlety by Mitski’s “Washing Machine Heart.” “Go find somebody else,” Øye and Bøe sing, closing the album on an unexpectedly bitter, but perhaps appropriately unresolved, note.

Even in this emotional turmoil, Kings of Convenience have retained not only their wryness, but also their distinctly tranquil guitar-centric sound. A pleasantly surprising stylistic current running through Peace or Love is bossa nova, but its consistently serene acoustic instrumentation can make it difficult to distinguish between the album’s most sonically disparate songs. Still, the subtle differences between the overcast atmosphere of “Killers,” buoyant strings of “Fever,” and gentle harmonies of “Comb My Hair” showcase Øye and Bøe’s technical prowess. A clear point of comparison is fellow Scandinavian folk-pop artist Jens Lekman, who conveys heartache with similar straightforwardness and sincerity. Lekman, however, imbues his songs with narrative clarity, tear-jerking sweetness, and invigorating pop hooks that Kings of Convenience continue to sidestep in favor of a reflective calm.

While few of the songs here approximate the radio-ready enthusiasm of 2004’s “I’d Rather Dance with You,” an utterly charming earworm that’s as flirtatious as it is self-deprecating, Kings of Convenience haven’t designed Peace or Love simply to be catchy. Their mission is best captured by “Ask for Help,” which subverts the gloominess of the preceding track, “Killers,” with a message of trust and support; it’s far from the caginess that Øye and Bøe convey in much of their music, and it opens the album conceptually to a meaningful feeling of platonic love. Informed by years of experience, growth, and collaboration, Kings of Convenience extend a comforting hand through the warm calm of their music.

Score: 
 Label: EMI  Release Date: June 18, 2021  Buy: Amazon

Eric Mason

Eric Mason studied English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where literature and creative writing classes deepened his appreciation for lyrics as a form of poetry. He has written and edited for literary and academic journals, and when he’s not listening to as many new albums as possible, he enjoys visiting theme parks and rewatching Schitt’s Creek.

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