Tiger Lou: Trouble and Desire

One of the most classic and overcrowded takes on music is undeniably the lovelorn singer songwriting with acoustic guitar in hand and broken heart in his or her chest. Which is why to survive in such a teeming musical genre you either have to have possess a sense of experimentation usually kept outside the realm of acoustics, an exceptional amount of talent, or an adept lyrical presence. Unfortunately, Tiger Lou exemplifies none of the above qualities on his debut EP, Trouble and Desire.

After mingling with electronics under the moniker of Araki, Swedish-born Rasmus Kellerman is now fully committed to his acoustic-centric project dubbed Tiger Lou. Meeting on a predictable intersection of Jeff Buckley, Coldplay, and Red House Painters, Tiger Lou attempts to rouse emotions through introspective lyrics and melancholic guitar plucking — and does indeed do a fair job at this — but the problem is simply that Rasmus is content with producing and playing severely average acoustic material in a world already muddled with mediocrity. More precisely, what plagues Trouble and Desire continually through its four succinct tracks is not a lack of sheer talent or an inability to convey his downcast sense of emotion, but instead an inability to do anything to differentiate himself from his older and more visionary musical precedents.

Trouble and Desire opens with “Sam, as in Samantha” — a downcast tune that drifts along with droning organs and gossamer layers of guitars filling in the background. As dark and mellow as that track is, Tiger Lou jaunts quickly into a bouncy, upbeat song in an attempt to prove the musical diversity his acoustic guitar exemplifies. Despite that “Nova Lee” seems destined to rise up the charts as part of Britpop’s next generation, musically it’s weaker and much less interesting than Trouble and Desire‘s opening cut.

The remaining couplet of songs, “When I Was a Kid” and “Trouble and Desire”, the disc’s title track, never stretch the expectations established by the EP’s first half as they both remain in the same mediocre, jaded musical terrain that thousands of musicians already occupy. It’s ironic, then, that Tiger Lou would opt for artwork of a faceless man to grace his debut EP’s cover, as it is an accurate summation of the music enclosed in Trouble and Desire.

It’s not that Tiger Lou is untalented, but he is seemingly unmotivated. He is content with producing stereotypical singer-songwriter fluff without taking a chance or risking anything artistically. Trouble and Desire is a recording that merely seems tired of itself and scared of its own potential.