By Brandon Bussolini
It would be hard to take someone seriously if they told you they were addicted to music. The notion of addiction might have more purchase for books or movies, but listening to music compulsively seems like a given for this generation. Music “helps” – in the broadest sense of that word: it can be restorative or push you into productive discomfort, and can help articulate feelings that might not get very far on language alone.
It’s easy to listen to Love Is All’s new album, A Hundred Things Keep Me up at Night (What’s Your Rupture), like water, two times a day easy, on the bus trying to calm down. With each listen, the disc becomes less like a collection of songs and more like a collection of vignettes, ones that seem to capture something important about what it feels like to be in the midst of your second adolescence.
Vocalist Josephine Olausson knows how to throw a good tantrum, but even amid the more blown-out sentiments of “Give It Back,” her delivery is so much more than merely spiteful as she delivers the lines: “All the love I gave you, give it back / Every time I praised you, I’m keeping track / Every minute on the phone / It was only cos I felt so alone.”