News: Lars Jensen Releases Debut CD...........bio .... about the songs ....purchase CD

Armed with an eclectic arsenal of musical styles certain to make any pigeonhole-assigning marketer scratch his head and reach for the hyphen key, Lars Jensen leaves the bullseye in tatters with his self-produced debut, Fate of the Titans.

His Danish name provides no clues to his musical identity. Lars obviously heard lots of soul-searching songwriters, and English and Irish rockers, in his time. It's not so unusual to move from the title track's Richard Thompson-ish electrified Irish waltz to No Apologies, which sounds almost as tho Ian Anderson's (Jethro Tull) flute could break in at any moment, but then, what's up with those gamelan instruments? Indonesia is just about as far as you can get (and not just geographically!) from the British Isles, or from San Francisco (Lars' current home), for that matter.

"I've been performing with a Balinese gamelan orchestra for the past 14 years," says Lars, "It's in my blood, by now, as much as anything else I've played." He traveled to Bandung, West Java, to record "the funkiest drummers on the planet, those Jaipongan guys," on Native Sun and Another Dance, which also feature the ringing bronze metallophones and gongs heard in Bali.

The disk opens with a cinematic orchestral flourish, leading into Tin Man, a lament on the frustration of bottled-up fantasies. It could be mistaken for a Peter Gabriel track, if it didn't have a hiphop beat.

This collection of songs is a solo tour-de-force. Lars composed all of the arrangements, and played most of the instruments himself ‚ often employing unusual instrumental combinations to get to the heart of the song. For The Numbers, it took all the over-the-top bravado he could squeeze from an industrial-size rock band to set a tone befitting this portrait of Ted Kazinsky (the UNABOMBER, remember him?), whom Lars considers to be "a fascinating outta-control egotist." Accordingly, the story is delivered in the first person; Lars gives him "all the rope he needs to hang himself." Fans of Elvis Costello should notice.

And he takes a page from the book of one of San Francisco's finest song stylists, Mark Eitzel (American Music Club), on the brooding Dresden, a darkly humorous swipe against fear of dying. So not much in the way of safe, comfortable subject matters here, but then, there's so much potential for incandescent moments, when the atmosphere is dark. Plenty of those on Fate of the Titans.


...........bio .... about the songs ....purchase CD