THE COLOUR OF SPRING
Jeniferever – Spring Tides (2009)
From the shelves
By the late 2000s, the post rock scene had already entered a phase of stagnation. Most of the pioneers lacked inspiration and settled with mannerisms, while their once groundbreaking formula became the blueprint for a new generation that was all but conventional. Flirting with indie rock helped keep things fresh for some time, but that didn’t last much either. Yet even then, a few artists managed to rise above formula, proving that you didn’t necessarily need to reinvent the genre to keep it compelling. Sweden’s Jeniferever were one of those bands.
Their name — a twist on the spelling of ‘Jennifer Ever’, a song from one of Smashing Pumpkins’ early demos — hinted at their influences, but their music drew from a wider map. On their second full-length album ‘Spring Tides’, released in 2009 on Monotreme Records, the band built a bridge between continents: from American acts like The Appleseed Cast and American Football they inherited a melodic taste for melancholy, while British and Northern European traditions brought a stronger, shoegaze-like sense of electricity and orchestration.
Despite their relatively young age at the time, the synthesis felt remarkable. Compared to the already promising ‘Choose A Bright Morning’ (2006), ‘Spring Tides’ showed a band becoming more deliberate in its songwriting. When I spoke with guitarist and keyboardist Olle Bilius back then, he described the change as part of a natural progression: “I would definitely say we’ve matured. But when it comes to writing music, I think it’s just as much about developing your taste and digging deeper into what you’re doing. The more I write, the less I feel the need to express emotion through big, powerful gestures. I’ve become much more sensitive to the small movements in a song. Maybe that results in a more mature sound”.
That attention to detail is one of the elements that still stands out today. Jeniferever’s music often feels both visionary and nostalgic at the same time: on the one hand, it sketches imaginary landscapes; on the other, it seems to evoke memories and emotions from a past that may or may not have existed. For Bilius, that quality reflects the peculiar mental space music can create. “Music is very much a way to go somewhere else with your mind”, he explained. “Maybe it’s not necessarily an escape from reality, but it lets you reach places you couldn’t reach otherwise. Wanting to go back there is what keeps me playing”. Singer and guitarist Kristofer Jönson elaborated more in-depth from a slightly different angle: “Writing a song takes longer than the second it takes to capture a photograph, but in many ways it works the same way. It reflects the circumstances surrounding the person who made it and the time when it was made. And looking back at it later will definitely bring back memories, both for the author and for the listener”.
Jeniferever would release another good album, ‘Silesia’, in 2011 — stylistically similar but perhaps slightly more accessible — before slipping into silence. The band has been inactive for years now, although some of its members resurfaced in a new project called Ştiu Nu Ştiu.
“For us the aim is always to go one step further than what we’ve just done”, Jönson said at the time. “You might feel satisfied with what you’ve accomplished, but that usually just makes you want to go even further with the next record”.
‘Spring Tides’ might not have rewritten the rules of its genre, but it proved once more something just as valuable: sometimes all it takes to stand out is the ability to move people. And Jeniferever certainly knew how to do that.
