Please (Sondre Lerche album)

Prior to the release of Please, Lerche had developed a reputation for a "jazzy brand of indie pop", according to PopMatters, with a wide range of influences and styles, including bossa nova chord progressions and eccentric lyricism. He began writing songs that would eventually appear on Please in early 2012. In the summer of 2013, Lerche and Mona Fastvold, to whom he had been married since 2005, divorced in what Lerche called a fast-moving "disintegration" of their marriage. Although he had already written and made early recordings of some songs on Please prior to the divorce, Lerche said many of his lyrics were then recontextualized as foreshadowing problems in his personal life. Lerche took the opportunity to record Please in the studio as a way to process these events, and it became what he called "such an important part of my dealing with everything". ==Recording==

According to Lerche, recording sessions for Please were somewhat evenly split between taking place in Bergen, his hometown, and Brooklyn, which was a process Lerche said "represents both where I come from and where I am". Norwegian studios used to record Please included Studio 5071, Ocean Sound Recordings, and Matias Tellez's Skogen Studio, while Rare Book Room and Room 17 were used for the Brooklyn sessions. Tellez, Kato Ådland, and Lerche himself all were credited as producers on the album. but some felt thematically inappropriate for the final album, something Lerche described as a feeling that these songs "belonged to the future"; though they were cut from Please, they eventually made their way onto his following album, Pleasure, in 2017. ==Music and lyrics==

Please is an indie pop album, Aftenposten described Please as Lerche "taking more risks", giving the album a rawer and more experimental sound while still possessing Lerche's pre-existing jazz and pop influences. Please contains "noisy overtones" and additional electronic effects, with songs like "At Times We Live Alone" (the longest on the album) driven by heavy guitar and electric organ instrumentation, in which Aftenposten saw inspiration from The Strokes and Arctic Monkeys. Lerche called the album "more raw and darkly cathartic" than any of his previous works. Writing for Consequence of Sound, Sasha Geffen described a metatextual irony in the song "Sentimentalist", which contains the line "I'm no sentimentalist", despite Lerche's career containing "charmingly polite love songs" rife with sentimentality; however, Geffen speculated Lerche was "in on the joke" as the song itself is called "Sentimentalist" with "no negative modifier to be found". Geffen characterized the song's blend of "1940s string ensembles and guitar-driven shoegaze" as another example of Lerche's adventurism on Please. Brice Ezell of PopMatters described "Sentimentalist" as containing the contradiction of being "a romanticist, but not a sentimentalist", which then opens "the questions that anyone is bound to ask after the dissolution of a long-term relationship". "Bad Law", the album's lead single, was written to capture the paranoid feeling of having done something wrong without knowing exactly what it was, inspired by Lerche's experiences at United States customs control when entering the country. this dissonance was echoed by Ezell, who additionally applied it to the instrumentation of "Bad Law", noting the moments "when the song's snappy, catchy guitar chords give way to a distorted, chaotic prechorus riff". while Ryan Parker of Pop Theology wrote that although Please contained sad themes surrounding the end of a relationship, "there's a manic joy to the whole affair where one might expect sober reflection". Stephen Thompson of NPR summarized the contrast between Pleases energetic musicality and its lyrical themes examining the darker side of love as "the work of a guy who understands that tearing down doesn't do much good if you don't bother building something better". Please also contains songs with supernatural themes, While in most cases Lerche had previously started his songwriting process with chords or melodies, the songs on Please used their rhythms as the starting point instead, which Lerche believed led to the album being "more stylistically and rhythmically concise". ==Release and promotion==

Please was first announced in May 2014, supported by the release of the album's first single, "Bad Law". Additionally, Lerche published 21 stems from "Bad Law" for free, and challenged fans to remix the song as part of a competition. The second single from Please, "Sentimentalist", was released on September 5, 2014. He later released additional music videos promoting Please, including "Legends" on 15 September 2014, "Sentimentalist" on 13 November 2014, and "Lucky Guy" on 19 February 2015. Please was released worldwide on 23 September 2014; it was published on Lerche's self-operated Mona Records label imprint, and was distributed by Yep Roc Records. before shifting to Europe later that October and November. In January 2015, Lerche performed "Bad Law" from Please as the closing act of the Spellemannprisen award ceremony in Stavanger, which the Oslo-based newspaper Dagsavisen called "an exceptionally outrageous performance". That August, Lerche told Aftenposten that, after some time spent touring and performing material from the album, he believed Please "belongs on a stage" due to the energetic nature of its songs, and remarked on its success at festivals. ==Critical reception==

Kellen McGugan of The Oklahoman positively reviewed Please by writing, "Most songwriters can lament love lost, but no one can do it quite like [Lerche]. Something about Lerche makes it personal. It is a rare gift we are lucky to share with him"; McGugan further commented on Lerche's "clever" lyrics and praised Lerche's honesty in his songwriting. Aftenposten, in Lerche's native Norwegian, also praised the earnestness of Please, calling it "genuine" and "alive" in a review by Eivind A. Westad Stuen. Sasha Geffen of Consequence of Sound rated the album a "C+", saying, "Lerche's playful expressions of heartbreak capture those extremes with competent, if rote, poise, even if a few of his experiments fall flat". ==Track listing==

Credits were adapted from the liner notes. Musicians • David Heilman – drums (1, 4–9), keyboards (6) • Chris Holm – bass (4–6, 8–10), guitar (5) • Alexander von Mehren – keyboards (5–6, 10) • Kato Ådland – various instruments (1–4, 7) • Matias Tellez – various instruments (5–6, 8–10) • Tim Fain – strings (9) • Steve Marion – additional guitar (8) • Kim Åge Furuhaug – drums (10) • Sondre Lerche – vocals, guitars (all tracks) Production • Kato Ådland – engineering, production (1–3, 7), mixing (1–4, 7), co-production (4) • Matias Tellez – engineering, production (5–6, 10), mixing (8–10), additional engineering (8–9) • Joe Rogers – engineering (9) • Sondre Lerche – production (4, 8–9) • Gabe Wax – engineering (4, 8) • Anthony Molina – mixing (5–6) • Tim Fain – string arrangements, engineering (9) • Steve Marion – engineering (8) ==Charts==