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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
One Hit. Wonder Where She's Gone?, August 21, 2001
Three Stars only, yes, but there's a place in the world for Three Star albums. No matter the standard comparisons, Ebba Forsberg is actually less a vocal resemblant of Randy Crawford, than a dead-ringer for Dido. But maybe I conjugate the verb incorrectly; it should be perhaps not "is a" but "was." For Ebba, talent no matter, is now moot and mute. Gone, as it were. Went Nowhere that Dido's decibel-doppelganger, flutey, vibrattoless tone hasn't now identically occupied very much elsewhere, Somewhere, all celebrated, sampled, referenced, and well known. Sad, that. For Ebba's a whole lot more talented and picturesque than the congratulated, chart-topping Miss Dido. But perhaps it is all what the sweetly sullen Miss Forsberg, if you'll listen closely to her lyrics and within them, always thought--somewhere inside her, beneath the outward efforts--WOULD happen to her career. The songs ebb and fill with autoprophetic pathos, the personal soundtrack of an artist deeply, genuinely, constitutionally unhappy. Possessed of a classically scandinavian statuary look, she also bears that classically scandinavian look-down. Forlorn to the bone, however well sculpted. What beauty she makes of all this musically is her reason for being, for singing. But dreariness weighs heavy, and even the drawn listener must eventually draw back. I do. But, still, in countless cash-out cullings of my own CD collection to the Used Record stores, I have never been able to rid myself of this one, depression notwithstanding. Greater works than this haven't survived the cut. I know why. "Lost Count," her first song, saves it every time, with no small help from the next two, the last of this triumvirate being "Carried," considered about as good an explicitly pro-God song as you'll ever find in the Secular. But it's still a sort of "Let There Be Light" from out there in Seasonal Affective Disorder. And Miss Forsberg sings with little exception of such twilight, in twilit hues, from twilighting casts. Even her upbeat moments are crepuscular counterfeits, unconvincing but welcome attempts to talk her and you into something I call La Vie en Pose, the making-believe of something into actual existence, the actress here at her piano hoping against the moping to finally become the actor of sunshine, eventually no longer acting. But like all the things we deign to Will into their Existence, it all sloughs off when the will tires and dies, as it must, the whole attempt in this case lasting the length of any song. Which puts the listener back where Ebba really lives, both between the songs and during them: in a mostly melancholic timbre, softly tossing off her deeply-believed sad-life thoughts in the connecting membrane between a serenity of acquiescent fatigue and a hopeless unaccepting ache. It takes a good bit of life, deep or wide, to realize a certain heretical truth held within Anguish: that there IS pain that is worth living to feel. Ebba knows it. And I would like to hear more of this she knows. She's a translator of Sundowns. Now, all this still might have made it from a First album to a Second one. And from Three Stars and Few Sales...to Five and Millionairingly Many. There's a place in the world for sad songs whose sadness may lead the listeners to catharsis. Who knows what would have done the Dido fame-trick for dear Ebba? Less sorrow? A false music-smile for mass radio-friendliness and an anemic marrow of easy-access lyrics? Not what I myself, by no means a card-carryimg member of the common audience, would want. But even I find myself wishing for more from this. Stronger, more adherently hummable hooks, the very litmus and clincher of All That Would Be Music. And the acid test, too, of most Music That Will Be Bought. But: I'll add this in eulogy for Ebba Forsberg's sadly unpotentiated career: In a friend's record store I've watched heads softly snap around when this album was played as a social experiment. For my sake. "Is this DIDO?" they asked, two of the customers, independently coming counterward within a minute. "No," I wanted to answer in earshot, butting in, unhappily proven right. "But it sure shoulda been."
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by Ebba Forsberg 
