Adam Gopnik opines, in his brilliant essay “Death of a Fish,” that, like Hitchcock essentially had one perfect blonde that he sought to resuscitate endlessly in actress after actress, kids have one ideal goldfish which they seek to replicate obsessively, almost religiously, throughout their childhoods. So too does Sondre Lerche re-create his albums, with minor adjustments, in release after release, with adamantine focus and precision, like a scientist adjusting the heat under the beaker, hoping the solution will come out just as he’d predicted this time.

The melodies, the chord progressions, the pacing, the ratio of ballads to barn burners to polite rhumbas, the theremins, the lyrical references to amplifiers — all will feel familiar, though not unwelcome, on Phantom Punch. Lerche, like any good, preternaturally gifted artist, seems to be constantly rewriting his own creative history. He knocks a little bit off the edge, slaps a new coat of paint on this facet of the polyhedron, swaps out the Brian Wilson cartridge for the — “let’s see what this one does!” — Elvis Costello module, tinkering with the brilliance of his own musical fingerprint as if it were an object that existed independent of his own authorial voice. Perhaps it’s the amnesia of creation, forgetting the pain and effort that went into the songs on Faces Down and Two-Way Monologue and, yes, even his originals on Duper Sessions, that has allowed him to approach each successive LP afresh, taking these relics of a past self like messages through time and unwrapping them with a “Well, what have we here” sense of wonder. Unwrapping them with a sense of wonder that’s less of the gift-wrapped under the Christmas tree vintage and more of the stumbling upon a cache of waterlogged treasures on a forgotten stretch of beach variety. For the fourth time now, he’s hauled his own back catalog out from under the dank and desperate seaweed onto a dry patch of sand, sheltered near a rocky outcropping or cove perhaps, where he can run his fingers along the ridges and spines and bumps and ripples in the objects — an old tube sock encrusted in sequins, a battery-operated magic lantern, a book of Braille poetry, a cracked bottle of absinthe — that somehow seem familiar yet deliciously, temptingly imperfect. He holds these objects tenderly, yet without undue reverence, knowing they’ve been entrusted to his care and that the only way he can justify releasing them back into the world on their own feet is to be completely unsentimental about rehabilitating them from the inside out. And so they are cleansed, exfoliated, voided, vacuumed, and polished—but the essence remains. Do you still smell the sea? It’s slipped between the molecules, binding the shiniest, most indelible bits together.

Phantom Punch breeds in us a deja vu, a happy familiarity that we’ve been here before.

Lerche is a wizard with melody, and the joke is that Phantom Punch is being regarded by anyone as any kind of “return” to “rock.” The sonics, sure, can be considered rockish—jangly bright guitars, propulsive drums, rumbly bass, slightly overdriven vocals in the high end. But it’s just drag. His songs are Tin Pan Alley ditties our grandmothers danced to in their youth. They’re selections off the Great White Way, providing the soundtrack to a thousand dreamers with stars in their eyes. They’re Brill Building slices of lemon meringue pie at Inspiration Point on prom night. Lerche is one of the great tunesmiths working today, and that’s his phantom punch. The 38-minute album goes down so smooth that you barely notice the onslaught of brilliance behind it. It does its job, gets in and gets out. The songs burn so cleanly, there’s no residue left behind. They don’t even stick in your head the way that an absurdly catchy pop song usually does. The album lives in this state of suspended animation, a perfectly balanced biosphere of rhythm, chord progression, orchestration, and lyric — self-contained yet proud to be observed — Rapunzel letting down her golden hair.

I do not mean to impugn rock ‘n’ roll, of course. Nor Lerche’s more straight-ahead stabs at jazz. It’s just that neither of them can contain all that he is capable of as a songwriter. Hearing him perform at near the top of his game here is startling. The sophistication of what he’s doing with the craft would sound show-offy if it were more forced. That’s part of what made Duper Sessions so disappointing last year: he was pouring all his talent into a mold that was too constrictive for him — the album sounded lifeless, too tight. He roams freely on Phantom Punch, though, and the songs shimmer and breathe with life. They sound jazzier than his supper-club rendition of “Night and Day” ever did.

And he knows it. You can hear it especially in the three-minute touchstone “She’s Fantastic,” as close to a modern Cole Porter song as we’ve gotten since Rufus Wainwright (Judy Garland notwithstanding) started chasing more operatic muses. Comparing his attraction to the She of the title with the doomed romances in Vertigo and Rebecca, he qualifies his emotion as being “minus the drama and the fraud.” On this album, he openly aspires, and nearly achieves, technical, classical brilliance on a par with a master craftsman like Hitchcock — without the bullshit. It’s talent untethered from strife and complicated backstory. Of course there are albums that need that churning engine of bile to fuel them, but pain needn’t be an inherent virtue, and a more-or-less rock album lacking angst doesn’t automatically become devalued. Especially when the pleasures taking the place of the various shades of intense anxiety are so thrilling, every bit as beautiful as a field illuminated with a host of midsummer fireflies.

Perhaps the brightest firefly in the gathering is the miraculous title track. It brings you in with a cock-of-the-walk guitar vamp that then explodes, in the second chorus, into a frantic, glittering, white-polyester disco strut before pulling way back into a wordless bridge punctuated by — get this — barnyard sounds that build back up to a murderously taut repetition of the “you don’t wanna feel the phantom punch” chorus until the band stops altogether on a motherfucking dime. In 2:58, he satisfies the indie rock snob’s desire for dirty, New York-style raunch, then undermines it with some guilty pleasure boogie straight out of the Brothers Gibb’s back pockets before subtly mocking the whole idea of genre purity with cows and sheep and horses. The mind boggles at how cunningly wrought the thing is.

The mind also boggles at how the thing will sound when it’s eventually rewritten. For Lerche, this exceptional exercise in indie rock perfection may get swept out to sea in a year or so and come back home wanting a shave and a haircut. But the rest of us are lucky enough to be able to keep this souvenir seashell close by so we can hold it to our ear to hear the calm, confident rush of a brilliant young talent whenever we please, right where we left it, in its glistening, exuberant prime.

Sondre Lerche Official Site
Astralwerks Records Official Site