When I first saw the name "Kings of Convenience" on this week's CD case, my mind immediately locked on the word "convenience." Without really wanting to, I remembered all the time I've spent in convenience stores as my mind's eye flashed to images of cold and dirty 7-11 stores, full of pre-processed canned foods and chemically enhanced strips of dehydrated beef in long plastic tubes. I thought of really dirty restrooms and the warm home cooking of Frito Lay potato chips.

These were not especially standout memories, and the qualities of "convenience" as represented by my local Circle K certainly isn't what I'm looking for in my music. Yet, because of the band's admittedly weak connection to some of America's best-known corn-dog and blueberry slushy pimps, I did jump to a few conclusions. Before firing up the album, I mentally prepared myself for music that would be as unnaturally dense and as greasy as a fast-food burger-- something that filling but about as nutritious (read: musically sound) as eating a lead paint sandwich. You can't exactly blame me for reacting like this, though. I mean, convenience is all the rage these days. People think convenience is cool. Convenience allows us to lead easy, low-maintenance lives, filled with such handy-dandy gizmos as remote controls, microwave pizzas, disposable diapers and accessible Internet porn.

Well, if wicked stomach cramps and a bookmark to the "All Anal, All Right" website is convenience, then the music of the Kings of Convenience is anything but. There's nothing cheesily plastic, needlessly slick or out-and-out lazy about this duo from Bergen, Norway, or their self-titled debut album. Over ten tracks of stripped-down acoustic-pop, Kings of Convenience offer subtle, subdued music that comes straight from the warm, bubbly hearts of these two brainy-looking Euro-dudes. It may not be terribly revolutionary music (almost every song here deals with either love or break-ups), but it can never be called mass-produced or "convenient" listening. This music is too beautiful, too smart and too completely uncompromising to experience any airtime on the 7-11 P.A.

One element that makes this album effective is that its songs have a sense of energy and motion to them, a dynamic quality that too many folk-inspired artists seem to forget. Most of these tracks glide along smoothly on slow and thoughtful rhythm. Strangely enough, it's on the tracks that actually have drumbeats (in the form of drum machines) where this rhythm becomes forced and throws the songs off, as on the opening track, "Toxic Girl." Luckily, these songs are few and far between. If you pick up Kings of Convenience looking for intelligent songs and sensitive, unpretentious acoustic music, you'll never think twice about putting a few dollars in these guys' pockets.

As for the issue of similar content, it could be argued that the content of this record is reminiscent of the other bands, but that claim could just as easily be dismissed as crap. If you pick up Kings of Convenience to hear songs about bridges over troubled waters, you'll just be out $15. Though recent Simon and Garfunkel comparisons are a load of garbage, they do bring up a good point about another aspect of the Kings' songwriting talents-- the lyrics. Although both the Kings of Convenience and Simon and Garfunkel have a clichéd "sensitive songwriter/poet" air about them, the things they're sensitive about really set their songs apart from one another. Nowhere near as hand-holdingly Bohemian as the work of Paul Simon, the Kings' songs aren't your average sing-a-longs. They're too solitary and lonely for that. If Simon and Garfunkel are the kindly old hippies selling weed outside the high school and preaching about the wonders of free love, the Kings of Convenience are the boys who've thought about smoking weed but can't because of their asthma.

The record's best lyrics come with "Parallel Lines," a song about two lovers who just can't connect. The song starts, "What immaterial substance envelopes two/ That one perceives as hunger and the other as food." In that simple line, sung in the Kings' charmingly warm voices, they set up the conflict of all personal conflicts, setting the stage for both heartbreak and one helluva song.

Convenience is not for everyone. Not everyone wants a completely plastic and eager-to-please existence-- even if it may mean an easier life-- because in the end, if something comes to us to easily, it doesn't mean anything. Convenience is the death of romance, and if there's one thing these Kings know, it's that one of the only things worth singing about is romance.

-Steven Byrd