The doors of the Roadhouse swing open, the curtain rises, and instead of Julee Cruise stepping out to sing a spectral ballad, a plump, floating fish with a mournful face materializes. It’s the image Fine offers in Jazz dreams, an album that seems to arrive from a peculiar corner of David Lynch’s universe. Yet it would be unfair to reduce it to a tired cliché.
Fine is the real name of Danish artist Fine Glindvad, who studied at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory. She sings with a voice reminiscent of Hope Sandoval and the elusive Lana Del Rey, and she has written for the K-pop group NewJeans (for example, the track “New Jeans,” which has racked up nearly 600 million streams). She had already shown she could craft catchy yet mysterious pop on her album Rocky Top Ballads, and Jazz dreams clearly marks a step forward that should place her firmly on the map.
The Twin Peaks reference isn’t as random as it seems, since Fine’s songs lean toward the American decadence aesthetic of that series, with a hint of country, as in “Goodbye brain.” But above all, they reveal a strong gift for composition in their arrangements and melodies, especially given how short they tend to be. Despite their quirks, the odd orchestral flourishes in “If you wanna come down” or the saxophone that suddenly enters in “Get it,” a track that traverses at least two eras of Stina Nordenstam, feel measured and restrained.
Jazz dreams isn’t the easiest pop record to approach because of its murky stance, and despite the timelessness of songs like “Everything in the shade,” which sounds like a lost 70s classic (this one more Lana-esque). Especially in the central stretch, with tracks like the obsessive “Any minute,” with its noir-jazz undertone, or the phantasmal “Million years,” the album unfolds as a journey that at times threatens claustrophobia, though Fine’s melodic nimbleness more than compensates for that sensation.
The sensuality of moments such as the line “tonight is the only occasion I could do it” in the otherwise stark “I Could,” or the old-school aura of “The thing” and “Much to say,” which open and close the album, builds a record full of memorable moments despite its short length. Between the more unsettling ragtime piano and Hollywood romance, Fine blends memorable melodies with arrangements that carry them along pathways that feel both strange and eerie.
An album of floating songs, of warped dream-pop delivered to a love that can become an obsession, yet also fraught with uncertainty. Above all, it is as dreamlike as the title promises. Passages like “you know your secrets very well, darling,” “I can’t think of anything else, but I still can’t remember you,” or “I want nothing more than this, and I could embrace you for a million years” twist the most clichés of romance into something far more ambiguous.
And yet Fine’s compositional deftness gives rise to tunes as charming as the ultra-short single “Sometimes I rush,” with trip-hop echoes; the more 90s-flavored “Run”; or the classic “Portal,” perhaps the track that best embodies the album’s title. A nocturnal song that speaks of disappearing and feeling lost, with a dark, dreamy atmosphere. Fine makes those moods coexist with melodies that are irresistibly catchy, supported by a voice that is as delicate as it is distant.
