Album Review: Lust For Youth - Perfect View

Lust For Youth is but one man. Hailing from Sweden, Hannes Norrvides continues in the vein of his Scandinavian contemporaries in moulding cold, alienated sounds that unnerve. Lust For Youth is focused on creating simplistic yet evocative synth lines, a Casio drumbeat and Norrvide's atonal call, wavering between forlorn and anguished. His second album this year, Perfect View doesn't try to hide this formula behind a slicker production, instead utilising the higher lustre to create a high-end sensual yet chaotic affair – more Blue Velvet than blue movie – and it's another confident step in Lust For Youth's steadily growing aesthetic.

Still, it is hard to fathom how Norrvide's assertion that these are tales of love and relationships fits in the real world. I Found Love opens things, and Norrvide's vocals echo out of the ether, a disembodied call from the electric mist amongst sharp intakes of a female voice. There are moments of sinister foreboding here that are exhilarating in their promotion – the electricity coursing along the wire drone of End which then bleeds into the muffled TV sample of the title track, itself turning into a Gothic trance  – that deliberately put the listener offside.

Yet for much of Perfect View, it seems that Norrvide is happy to hide behind synthetic loops and vague notions, thus masking his real intentions. Apart from some fleeting crystalline moments, the album remains aloof, lost in the fog. As an ambient wash, it works well; but as a stand-out pop statement, there's little to grasp onto here.