Sondre Lerche should have been physically restrained from making Duper Sessions. To make a jazz album, even a “jazz-inflected pop album,” necessitates a jazz voice, a voice with unusual texture, range, and emotional nuance. This petite Norwegian singer-songwriter may have a minor talent for pop songcraft, but he doesn’t have a jazz voice. Intricate arrangements overshadowed the vocals on his previous two albums, but Duper Sessions, recorded live with minimal overdubbing, reveals his voice for what it is: pure treacle.

When that marshmallow delivery is matched up with appropriate lyrics and a stand-up backing band, the resulting songs could win over a gang of Hell’s Angels. Unfortunately, the stars are only thus aligned on two tracks, ‘Minor Detail’ and ‘Across the Land’. The rest of the album is a wince-inducing romp through a show tune landscape of rockabilly strings, piano glissandos, and ascending staccato power chords. You start to wish the backing band wasn’t quite so talented, because well-executed folly is like a martial arts master with an automatic weapon: particularly deadly. This is nowhere more apparent than on the album’s covers. Elvis Costello’s ‘Human Hands’, an elegant paean to the loneliness of desire, begins with the masterful line “I’m just a mere shadow of my former self-ishness.” Lerche sings it like he’s just been laid. Twice. If he’s capable of evoking darkness, he’s not doing it here, and he’s certainly not doing it on his attenuated rendition of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’. I’m not denying it’s an accomplishment to joyously belt (I use this term loosely) the ominous phrase “when the jungle shadows fall.” It’s the kind of accomplishment, however, that makes me want to invent a device with a big red button you push to cause all copies of Duper Sessions to spontaneously combust.

Sondre Lerche knows how to make stylish music, but he seems to have forgotten that stylish doesn’t have to mean happy-go-lucky. On ‘Nightingales’ he blithely sings, “do something true and drop the fairytales.” If he had focused on the lyrics of these love songs, he might have toned down the jazz hands and told us the truth that Cole Porter never let us forget: love’s pleasures, like life’s, are often bittersweet.