Glenn MacDonald has finally reviewed “Mazarin” on his website, “The War Against Silence” (http://www.furia.com/twas). For those of you who enjoy reading Glenn’s thoughts on Roxette, this will be a bit of a disappointment as he gives “Mazarin” a less-than-stellar review and I think he’s wrong (there’s a first time for everything!). I believe this is only the second review I’ve read of “Mazarin” that said it wasn’t brilliant (-: Here it is:

Last I checked, the monster didn’t get Marie, and a brain tumor didn’t, either, but the tumor did take her out of commission for a while, and whatever the actual sequence of events, Per’s solo album is now doomed to seem to me like what he did while Marie was recovering. This is one dopey thought, but now I doubt I’ll ever shake it. The deliberately superficial lilt of these frilly pop songs makes sense as the sort of borderline-patronizing convalescent cheer that seeing adults reduced to dependents often inspires, and singing them in Swedish, despite Marie’s fluent English, would also be a reversion to something more basic for her.

Or maybe I’m willing to feel like I’m intruding because even if this isn’t Mazarin’s text, Gessle is still reconnecting to something that I don’t share. Stripped to strummy acoustic-guitar cores, these thin songs fall out of the bottom of the underlying simplicity of his songwriting, for me, like a great chef working without his few essential spices or his favorite spatula. I didn’t live through the Sixties, and I didn’t grow up on anything this sunny. I like these songs best when they break out of their jello molds and act more like people than peace-sign bobblehead dolls, when they stop worrying about agitating the bedridden. “Födelsedag” gnashes and bounds and struts, an airy choir ahhing accompaniment. “Sakta Mina Steg” hangs in helium falsetto. “Spegelboll” sounds like Blondie’s “Atomic” rewritten as a robot-western theme. “För Bra För Att Vara Sant” warms to its chiming choruses. “Här Kommer Alla Känslorna (På En Och Samma Gång)” twitters and whistles like music from a children’s show I might actually have liked. “Jag Tror Du Bär På En Stor Hemlighet” sounds like an acoustic demo for a Roxette song. But too often, on the rest of this album, Per has gone back to a base he and I don’t share.