Jeniferever

"It has almost become a cliche that Scandinavians make this kind of music well - the kind of heart-swelling soundscapes that beg to be described in terms of glaciers and geysers. On this, their second album, Jeniferever rise above such cliches with 10 beautiful songs that take the Sigur Ros blueprint and expand on it: "Ox-Eye" and "Sparrow Hills" add some muscle to the mix, reminiscent of Mew's collaboration with J Mascis, while the nine-minute centrepiece, 'Nangijala', is almost classical in scope. (4/5)"
- Uncut April 2009

"Over ten years since they first began, Sweden's Jeniferever return with their second full-length album. An ambitious and epic collection of songs, 'Spring Tides' lulls you in slowly with the darkly melodic opener 'Green Meadow Island', before broadening its sonic horizons and ideas. It's incredibly hard not to be moved by the shimmering instrumentation and Kristofer Jonson's nostalgic, disembodied vocals, especially on 'Ox-Eye' and the hauntingly desperate 'The Hourglass'. Much like that old favourite song that plays randomly on your iPod one day, 'Spring Tides' reaffirms Jeniferever's heart-wrenching talent. For some odd, unknown reason, they're somehow easy to forget when not around. When they are, they simply stagger and astound. (4/5)" - The Fly May 2009

"The Cellar is a truly beautiful place, a small, dark, underground nest of throbbing expectancy when the lights and crowd wait on an empty stage. Playing on that stage is always a rush, it’s the only venue in Oxford that has riotous potential, where the prospect of all-out instrument breaking musical revolution and adrenaline-heavy war can hang in the air. Drunk and dark, you wish for these things, and Jeniferever are due to beckon them.

Onstage Jeniferever are, in short, two bassists, two guitarists, drums, with at times three vocalists, the lead of these Kristofer, occasionally sacrificing his guitar for a crouch at the keys. The first track on the new album Spring Tides, is the first track of the night, Green Meadow Island. The climax of this song is particularly beautiful, it is my most awaited of moments after countless album listens and it expands onto the stage magnificently, the best section of live music I’ve seen since Radiohead’s Victoria Park show last summer, and in the band’s intelligent instrumentation, not a bad comparison in terms of sound. One thing that really comes across live, and is enhanced by the Cellar’s cavernous acoustics, is the percussion. Rather than simply filling out the epic sound in a sea of cymbals and throbbing toms, the rhythm is a source of energy and variety that runs across, as well as together with, the rest of the band. It’s testament to the band’s sound that they can at one minute provide the perfect foot-tapping Saturday feeling of release, and at another, that epic, spaced-out star-gazing meditation, which is easy in the studio, but hard for most bands to deliver live.

The set is hypnotising in the best sense, each song running naturally into the next without bleeding into boredom, the crowd clearly enthralled for the duration. The band finish with Across the Sea, thus book-ending the show with probably their two best (or rather, popular) tunes, and giving the night a certain closure. The satisfied crowd are left to weigh their post-gig options with an air of slight bewilderment, like people who have been taken to the moon and now earthbound are lost for motivation. I approach a busy after-show Kristofer, his speaking voice and manner the perfect duplicate of his onstage persona; he is tired from the tour, he is looking forward to his day off tomorrow, he enjoyed the show. I feel the conversation is somehow inadequate after such majestic musical expression and connection. Tongue-tied without our stage and lights and amps uniting us, I tell him I’m from subba-cultcha, he seems to relax, smiling, ‘Ah, yeah, we’ve been on there a few times,’ and like the comfort of an old friend, with the relief and release of familiarity, we each walk off, knowing that as long as there’s music worth writing on, people will write on it, and in what could almost be a lyric from the new album, nothing ends but is simply reformed, Spring Tides suddenly seeming an apt name for the future of Jeniferever and their listeners, a band worth seeing again and again, and an album deserving the same. "
- Subba-Cultcha April 2009

"While Sweden’s Jeniferever made a lot of friends with the release of 06’s ‘Choose A Bright Morning’, the foursome’s debut long-player wore its influences rather too broadly for the record to truly stand out as a must-have release in the post-rock-cum-shoegaze field. With ‘Spring Tides’, they find their own voice magically, from the outset stamping their mark through new material that sparkles with a greater iridescence than anything they’ve penned previously, and the contrast from ethereal elegance to cacophonous bombast ensures attentions never wander. One example of their more-muscular approach is ‘Ox-Eye’, which pummels the listener into a dizzy state of sweet escapism, Kristofer Jönson’s light vocals filling the spaces between each thunderous drumbeat; that the track fizzles to an end only to glide wonderfully into the gentle, piano-led ‘St Gallen’ is indicative of the band’s ability to mix styles with no faltering of coherency. The previously released ‘Nangijala’ doesn’t feel out of place, its inclusion a worthy one given the limited-release nature of its original EP of last year, and come the title-track closer the listener has witnessed a band operating at a never-before-achieved level of accomplishment. ‘Spring Tides’ is a purely natural high, available to all.
For fans of: The Appleseed Cast, Last Days Of April, Mono (8/10) - Rock Sound - April 2009

"Since their formation in 1996 Jeniferever have been staring at their starkly beautiful home of Uppsala, Sweden - lush in its greenery compounded by intricate, artful architecture - and have infused these qualities into their music. While earlier in 2009, The Appleseed Cast gave us a mesmerising melding of rock dynamics and lyricism with post-rock sensibilities, Jeniferever have gone and surpassed them in every single way imaginable.

Post-rock usually treats its listeners like one might treat a beloved pensioner with six heart-attacks behind them: no sudden movements and the familiarity of routine. With Jeniferever accompanying them, they'd be dead in minutes. The Swedes prove adept at straddling the rock staple of swift, unexpected rhythmic and tempo changes as well as being equally proficient at arrangements which layer tension and intensity like the sands of an hourglass. Upon pressing play, there's no ten-minute wind-up as each instrument gradually takes a bow, we're launched straight into the action on "Green Meadow Island" with a ride-cymbal smash and a throbbing bassline. Before thirty seconds are through, our vocal host for the next hour has already been cued.

Throughout Spring Tides there are both examples of complex twists and seamless segues. "Concrete and Glass" and "St. Gallen" answer for the first as the former breathlessly switches from confusion to resolution in the space of a heartbeat, constructing the kind of drums/piano/vocal concoction which Keane only experience in their fevered dreams. The latter, meanwhile, offers a plodding piano-led groove which gives over most of the runtime to ingrain itself into your consciousness before peppering it with guitar licks and then surprising with a Hail-Mary pass of lyricism.

Stepping forward as examples of the latter - seamless segues - we can call upon both "Ox-Eye" and "The Hourglass". Rather than just being content with hiding the changes via tip-toeing subtlety, both have a greater ability conferred upon them. It feels as if the gradual changes to one aspect of the song actually resonates, morphing the entire composition around itself as it diverges. Take the former, "Ox-Eye", introduced with spoken word vocals the effect is a stark contrast to those we have witnessed previously. Stripped of their humanity at first, warmth, sustain and range are gradually lent to the performance, hooking the arrangement as the metamorphosis progresses. Where once a sparse, plaintive dirge stood, now strides a commanding supernova of a song. As front-man Kristofer Jonson pumps kinetic energy into vast swathes of firing cylinders he continues to channel ever intensifying emotional resonance into his voice. That is before it all nosedives into a vortex, sucking the humanity once more from the track.

"The Hourglass", for its part, does the opposite. Initially juxtaposing up-tempo, serene music with disconsolate, forlorn intoning. Gradually, Jonson infects the song, dragging the mood down with him, which only serves to further fuel the anguish felt by the protagonist.

As with previous album Choose a Bright Morning, the centrepiece of the album (track five in both cases) proves to also be the lengthiest. Named for the land chronicled in Astrid Lindgren's children's novel The Lionheart Brothers, "Nagijala" is filled with shared themes. "Let go of the burden that keeps you looking back at the tracks that you made as you fell / What's the reasons for that if we will never try to stand again." Jonson declares in the dark, yet positive number. Disease, death, tyranny, betrayal and rebellion may have been overly weighty themes for a book aimed at the young, but here, they are perfect: obstacles on a journey in which the song focuses less on the documentation of the journey from point A to point B and more on the atmosphere throughout, the feelings experienced with each foot placed nearer to the destination: the continual pace, the need to proceed and the triumph in perseverance. At nine minutes in length, you'd expect it to bounce around every dynamic known to mankind, to the contrary, it remains rhythmically stoic, despite this, not once does an aura of repetition descend, so numerous are the intricacies woven into the fabric of the song.

With so many lofty aims and such complex arrangements you would naturally expect there to be many mis-steps along the way. We have taken the liberty to list everything which might dissuade you from sampling Jeniferever's sophomore album for yourself in the following paragraph...

(9/10)" - Strangeglue

The sky merges into the sea forming an infinite sheet of grey, the dank air half-heartedly threatening rain as people shuffle through the gloom, eyes fixated on the pavement ahead of them; somewhat bizarrely, a winter Sunday morning provides the perfect visual accompaniment to 'Choose A Bright Morning', an album tailor-made for bedroom introspection. Stunning opener 'From Across The Sea' glides atop a cloud of shimmering reverb and delay, while the strafing bowed guitars of 'Magdeleno' loom ominously from the shadows of the album's gauzy sonic cathedral, framing the near-unbearable emotional catharsis of 'Opposites Attract'. Indeed, with many still thinking the term 'emotive' is synonymous with daft hairstyles and silly fashions, bands like Jeniferever have never been more essential.

8/10 - Joe Marshall

"A luscious mixture of ambient indie, post-rock, shoegaze and dream pop comes from Swedish quartet Jeniferever who release their sophomore sonorous album 'Spring Tides' and wait for the world to listen. Having formed in 2002 they have gained a serious following in Europe.
The album is an instant hit to the brain. ‘Green Meadow Island,’ is a crashing atmospheric start. Like many of the rest of their songs it starts slowly and builds in layers into an instrumental climax. ‘Concrete and Glass’ continues in this way. While on ‘Ox – Eye,’ the vocals take over. They are dreamy yet angst ridden and float over the aural soundscapes. They sound like The Cure in a Snowstorm. On ‘St Gallen,’ piano and brass compete for prominence on this ice cold instrumental gem. Just when you have spent minutes lulled into the music, the guitars and dreamlike vocals kick in. ‘If you bring words I’ll bring pen and paper.’ On Nangijala Kristopher Jonson lisps adoringly ‘let go of the burden that keep you looking back at the tracks that you made as you fell. What’s the reasons for that?’ He sounds like Conor Oberst guesting with Mazzy Star; a delicate acoustic strum, which ascends into ambience. At nine minutes it never feels too long. On the title track the telling refrain is ‘her stories they are beautiful but they won’t bring me back.’ Maybe they will?
The ten songs on Spring Tides combine acoustic guitar with evocative warped key sequences. Heart rending strings and murderous percussion complete the picture. They are all very individual pieces that complement each other beautifully. The music is both gentle and violent, a great combination. Ambitious orchestral fare and a great find. (5/5) - Subba-Cultcha

Jeniferever are part of the sound of young Sweden, but eschew the pursuit of the perfect three-minute Pop song approach of many of their peers in favour of submerging themselves in gorgeous, mesmerising Space Rock. So in place of Jonathan Richman and dreams of drumming cats, it's early Seefeel and Slowdive that are the key reference points here.

Underpinned by a languid rhythm of heartbeat drumming, washed with breathy vocals that in places spark with a liquid emotion that casts a shadow of the ghost of early Prefab Sprout and with a lush façade pierced with sparkling ice guitars shards, this is a frosty morning treat that will melt your heart. - Alistair Fitchett

The debut album from Sweden´s Jeniferever is a beauteous little treasure of atmospherics that is so unequivocally of itself that it seems to reflect its own image back, with each track posessed of a kind of meta-ambience that hears its own call. There´s a disorienting closeness here that leaves you grappling for points of origin, like time itself is a dream that dreams itself awake. Morning glorious.

4/5

- Stephen Brolan

Drowned in Sound has expanded from a small online music zine into a whole gig-promoting, record-releasing empire, and their tentacles have streched as far as Sweden to uncover something lovely here. Jeniferever are a quartet from Uppsala whose debut album, with its lovelore lyrics("with a broken heart and her name on the tip of my tongue, oh Emily..."), breathy vocals, Kevin Shields-style glide guitar(essentially the fingerwork excised, and only the afterglow remaining), floating rootless basslines, subtle unobtrusive drumming and interesting auxiliary instrumentation(French horn, banjo), has the slightly dazed atmosphere of a more acoustic My Bloody Valentine. - SP