The final track on Sondre Lerche's debut album, Faces Down, is called "Rosebud," a subtle nod to the impending springtime evident on the entire record. Faces Down is great cold weather music, and why shouldn't it be? It was released late last year by 19-year-old Sondre Lerche, who hails from Norway. The front cover of the album is all grays and blues, with a subdued-looking Lerche standing in front of a stark background. Upon first listen, this album may seem the same: mellow, cool, and, except for a few songs, laid way back. But upon closer listening, it becomes much more like another photograph, the one within the album's liner notes. This shows the same young wholesome Lerche up close in an almost-silhouette, sunlight streaming behind him.

Faces Down is not only an impressive debut from someone so young, but it is a surprising and elegant mixture of offbeat folk, Brazilian-flavored pop and sweet 1960s based nostalgia. This is what would happen if Hunky Dory-era David Bowie met Tigermilk-era Belle and Sebastian on a glacier and started jamming on Beatles tunes. This album isn't about lyrics—most of Lerche's words aren't confessional in nature. The lyrics are not quite cohesive, but not nonsense either, and thus fall short of being particularly memorable. Fortunately, forgetting the lyrics doesn't make you feel like you're missing anything at all (and that's a good thing). Once again, the album is best explained by the picture in the liner notes: Lerche is in silhouette, not important; it is the sunlight streaming behind him, the gleaming and delicate swell of the music, that is the true center of Faces Down.

Lerche's voice is all over the spectrum on the album: on "No One's Gonna Come," he is Bowie, while on "Sleep On Needles" he is perhaps a light-hearted Thom Yorke. He is always Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian, at least a little. Despite his chameleon-like tendencies, Lerche's voice always accompanies the music perfectly, sounding best when paired with his amazing female back-up singers, as is demonstrated most charmingly on "Modern Nature."

"Modern Nature" is certainly one of the best songs on Faces Down, if only by virtue of its insane chipperness (don't worry, this isn't as frightening as it sounds). "Modern Nature" is a beautiful song, and it does manage to capture a certain feeling. It is the track perfect for that day, we all know it: that day when the temperature is suddenly, inexplicably 70 degrees, when the day before was only 30. The free-wheeling attitude of the lyrics and fun, retro music are the sound of someone throwing himself into spring and not looking back. Coming exactly halfway through the album, "Modern Nature" provides the perfect ending to the slow thaw that is the first half of the album.

Faces Down would be most suited to vinyl, as it is so clearly split in two, both sonically and conceptually. Side one is winter, side two is spring. Ironically enough, Lerche has a track entitled "Side Two," a slow, icy ballad, on the first side of the record. The first and second halves of the album are interestingly comparable song-for-song, with the first half significantly less funky than the second.

This is a good thing for the first half of the album, because the funkier parts are also the least inspired. It is obvious that Lerche isn't an indie rock fellow; he just wants to play his Kinks 45s in peace, thank you. The more experimental instrumentation isn't necessary and seems thrown in simply to give the album a more modern feel. An example of this problem is "All Luck Ran Out," which is weighted down by fuzzy guitars, thus dampening its initial, bouncy appeal.

Lerche's songs are never what you expect of them; each is a surprise. They start out as something and keep growing, becoming what they need to be by the end. This is demonstrated in "Things You Call Fate," a track that could be considered the flip-side to the great fourth track, "Suffused with Love."

These two tracks bear the most obvious resemblances to various British Invasion artists, namely The Beatles and The Kinks. "Suffused with Love" is a cold, sweet tune, and you can almost see Lerche's breath in the Norwegian air as he sings, "Don't spend all your time making someone else's dream come true." The two tracks preceding it have similar feels, with "You Know So Well" as a speaker full of swelling strings, and "Sleep On Needles" sounding like the glimmer of hope missing from Radiohead's classic album The Bends.

Lerche is of the old-school persuasion that the chorus is infinitely more important than the verse– and on this album he makes you agree with him. The verses are, at times, slow and forgettable. They are forgettable not because they are boring, but because the chorus always hits with such a wave of hummable, nostalgic melody that it overpowers them, every time. Where the verses are sparse with instrumentation, the choruses of Lerche's songs are a veritable wall of sound: piano, guitar, strings, anything and everything.

This disparity between verse and chorus becomes the most apparent on the seventh track, "Virtue and Wine," (easily relatable to the opener, "Dead Passengers"). Its verses are gentle lounge music, but the charged-up chorus blows them away. The song then evolves into a sweet, sparse breakdown–but the chorus is what comes back to you. The song starts out only vaguely intriguing, but by the end of its five-and-a-half minute run time, Lerche has given listeners all they could hope for.

The second side of the album continues with "On Again Off Again," which is reminiscent of British chart-toppers Travis' best moments. The song's only misstep is the inclusion of spacy sounds and silly backups between verses, which wouldn't really be noticeable if the chorus didn't ring with such beautiful clarity. "No One's Gonna Come" is undeniably Hunky Dory, while the aforementioned "All Luck Ran Out" and "Things You Call Fate" round out the second half of the album.

"Rosebud" is the last track, dubbed on the CD as the "U.S. only bonus track," but it is difficult to imagine the end of the album without it. It is the definitive final track, in that it is different from all the others: Lerche's full-blown warm weather song. It has ticking beats and very little instrumentation, just delicate harmonies; it is The Beach Boys filtered through a catalog of Brazilian pop.

"Dead Passengers" has opened the album with a moody piano and the declaration that "When there is light from up above, then there will come a sacred dove to the basement." "Rosebud" is that light. "Is it all make-believe?" Lerche asks over and over. If you believe in this album, the answer is no, not completely.

So what if spring doesn't come to Minnesota until May? Sit back and listen to Faces Down with the hope that the sacred dove of spring will come soon. Remember along with Sondre Lerche how it feels, and realize for the first time how it sounds.