M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Sometimes concert promoters pick a musician as the leading act simply from how much hype the artist has generated.
And judging from how much accolade Sondre Lerche received for his first two albums, the promoter of Soundshine `07 indie music festival correctly signed up Lerche as the show's headliner.
The Bergen-based Norwegian singer-songwriter has scored success on both sides of the Atlantic for peddling Sunday-morning melodies that rely much on his boyish, yet accomplished voice.
Lerche's first record Faces Down was a hit in his home country and widely acclaimed in Europe and the U.S. Rolling Stone magazine even ranked Faces Down in its top 50 albums of 2002.
The big break for the 25-year-old singer came in 2004 with his second album Two Way Monologue, a light-hearted album that assimilates decades of chamber pop, folk and even jazz.
And for casual fans who came to Soundshine '07 expecting to listen to Lerche rehashing his old repertoire of twee pop, they weren't likely pleased with what they found.
Instead of simple, sweet melodies and lyrics, concertgoers had to put up with Lerche's distortion-heavy and melody-free set, mostly culled from his latest album Phantom Punch.
The first four songs were so hard that indie rock fans felt they had landed at the wrong concert.
Show opener Say It All saw Lerche assault his guitar so hard that what came out of the speaker was an ear-splitting cacophony that drowned out his boyish crooning altogether.
And augmented by a treble-heavy sound system, what meant to be an indie rock party rightfully turned into a metal fest.
It was as though Belle & Sebastian had gone emo and covered Weezer's songs in a live show.
But what fans failed to get from Lerche, they got it from Swedish quintet Club 8.
Performing before Lerche, Club 8 delivered the finest distillation of twee pop, with jangling guitars atop laid-back singing that summoned the carefree ambiance from a solitary walk under a blue sky in the afternoon.
Singer Erlend Oye of indie folk-pop duo Kings of Convenience, who is also a native of Bergen, once said that the lack of sun in Nordic countries had contributed much to the delicate tunes and calming voices produced by legions of indie pop bands from the region.
And Club 8 was no exception.
One of the songs the band performed that night, Love in December, perfectly captured such melancholy. It even had, as lead singer Karolina Komstedt said, a Nordic atmosphere.
In Love, guitarist Johan Angergrd traded his guitar for an electric organ that later lent much of the song's haunting and strangely beautiful quality.
Candy-coated melodies were not the only attractions in Club 8's one hour-plus show.
In her understated way, Komstedt charmed concertgoers who packed the Upper Room, a medium-sized concert hall at the Nikko Hotel in Central Jakarta.
Komstedt's shyness and unassuming demeanor apparently drew more attention than her angelic vocals.
""You know why I put my hand on my ear like this? Because I can't bear to hear my own voice,"" she said to the audience midway through the band's performance.
And it was hard not to be smitten.
