The fact that Logh decided to call their new album North seems to be indicative of their concern with feelings of disorientation and the need to have a sense of direction.  Each of the tracks portrays encounters with fear and confusion, places where black and white dissolve in a tidal wave of overwhelming ambiguity.  The result is an album which attempts to map the spectrum of feeling out of one’s depth, with the common thread being the search for meaning, or the need to find some kind of grounding or perspective in order to find the way back home. 

The album opens with “Saturday Nightmares,” throwing the listener into an intense semi-amnesic depiction of what appears to be a lovers tryst gone wrong. Vocalist Mattias Friberg sets the tone for the songs to follow with the lines "I was meeting someone/No one showed up/And when trouble came by/I tried to find a friendly face in the night." This is where everything starts to get hazy, and we become dragged into a vaguely Lynchian nightmare. Friberg sings about seeing friends as ghosts and attempts to discern just what it all means.  “All the Trees” follows a similar blueprint: a drug deal turns into a mugging and a fight, leaving us with a similar feeling of being ensnared.  Once again, an overriding sense of paranoia pervades the songs' atmosphere, leaving the listener with the feeling of having become tangled up in a maze with no discernible exit. 

But what is impressive about the album is how it manages to balance this sense of fear and confusion with a contrary wonder and hope, and how this is achieved in a number of different ways. “Weather Island,” for example, uses the changing seasons as a metaphor for emotional coldness and paralysis being gradually alleviated over time. “Death to My Hometown” acts out a similar catharsis through its mantra-like repetition: "Death to your concern/Death to my return/Death to my hometown…" Fittingly placed at the beginning of the album‘s second half, “The Black Box” seems to epitomize this contrast as a moment of transition, using a build which is best described as Death Cab for Cutie meets Sigur Rós. Again, the music is perfectly constructed to bring out the most in Friberg‘s lyrics: "Time to go or/Everything will/Stay the same and/This will only hurt/This confusion/Must have an end now." 

Many of the latter songs on the album also incorporate a wider range of orchestration to echo this sense of overcoming inhibition and moving on. Primarily through their use of synths, (which are absent from the rest of the album) “Forest Eyes”, “Sometimes,” and “A New Hope” seem to form a more hopeful sound of their own, albeit one with a heavily melancholic tinge. The first of these feels almost as a track from Bright Eyes’ Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, the second is pure Grandaddy style melancholic-wonderment, while the final track acts as a reprise of “The Black Box” and its piano build.

All in all, this is a fantastic album, musically, lyrically, even in terms of its production. The only criticism I can give is of “Thieves in the Palace”, which despite having one of the darkest and most powerful moments of the album, seems strangely inconsistent with the album as a whole.  Though having said this, I can see many people finding the song particularly appealing for this very reason. But to be honest, this is a relatively minor complaint; North is, nevertheless, a triumph. 

-Alan Miles