Pitchfork

At 23 years old, Norwegian pop prodigy Sondre Lerche has toured America with Elvis Costello and appeared on the "Late Night With Conan O'Brien". At 23 years old, this reporter has toured upstate New Jersey with his grandma and appeared to be handicapped at the dance club last weekend.

Piddly differences aside, both of us are eagerly awaiting the Stateside release of Lerche's third full-length, Duper Sessions, a David Lynch-ready excursion into jazz-pop to be released March 21 on Astralwerks. Once again, we are again behind the times-- Duper Sessions entered the Norwegian album chart at number four when it was released in February.

Duper Sessions-- named for the place it was recorded, Duper Studio in Bergen, Norway, not as a bad pun-- features Lerche's longtime accompanying band, the Faces Down, along with pianist Erik Halvorsen. It includes covers of Cole Porter's "Night and Day", Prefab Sprout's "Nightingales", and Elvis Costello's "Human Hands". Read Lerche's diary entries on his website to find out how obsessed he is with Elvis Costello. It's kinda scary.

Super duper tracks:

01 Everyone's Rooting for You
02 Minor Detail
03 Across the Land
04 The Curse of Being in Love
05 Dead End Mystery
06 Night and Day
07 Once in a While
08 Human Hands
09 (You Knocked Me) Off My Feet
10 (I Wanna) Call It Love
11 Nightingales
12 I'm Not From Here
13 You Sure Look Swell

Lerche is already at work on yet another LP slated for 2006 release, but instead of classy and jazzy, this one promises to be a punchy, aggressive rock record. He plans to record in L.A. this spring with producer Tony Hoffer (Belle and Sebastian, Beck) and put the album out in the fall.

Dude has a smattering of live dates scheduled for April, and on his website promises that these shows will be "exclusively generous, marathon-ish, Springsteen-esque - in other words - loooong." But don't feel bad if you get bored and start fantasizing about hitting up Jamba Juice on the way home, because "Sondre previously has expressed mixed emotions with attending concerts that last too long, [so] he'll ask the members of the crowd to stay only till they've had their fix. No hard feelings." How considerate.

On and off again:
04-06 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom *
04-08 Los Angeles, CA - The Troubadour #
04-09 Los Angeles, CA - The Troubadour #
05-24 Bergen, Norway - Nattjazz $

* with Leona Naess
# with Annie Stela, Peter Walker
$ with Omar Sosa Trio