Søren’s material is both accessible and imbued with left-of-centre detail, such as the strings that crackle and echo like ancient memories under his wholesome vocal.
Every note on Somewhere Else seems expressly designed to elicit as many emotions from the listener as possible.
The songs of Somewhere Else are hot-air balloons, charmingly handmade and possessed of an element of the unknown; you're not sure how high these things are supposed to go.
Indians has crafted a finely-tuned, hauntingly beautiful, if still tentative, collection of songs.
There will be those who will listen to Indians and not get swept along with their world-weary tidings but for those who feel the same or just want to escape, this LP is perfection.
With a ≈ voice and inclination to bounce from piano and strings immediately to arpeggiated synth and drum machines, Indians makes this feel like the quintessential debut album: a collection of great ideas without much purpose.
The record has an enjoyable purity – unbound by any sort of baggage, emotional or otherwise, you can appreciate the form, the shape, the craft in the abstract, shorn of any sort of context.
Somewhere Else in the end leaves the listener longing for something else, some little bit of grist in the mill, to make the songs stick in the head and in the heart. There’s promise here to be sure, but it’s a promise as yet unfulfilled.
On Somewhere Else, Juul combines his fragile falsetto with ambient, hazed-out synths to create impressionistic glaciers that counter-intuitively radiate warmth.