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Written in
fRoots
issue 346, 2012
ALLA FAGRA
Vi Är Alla Fagra!
Playing With Music PWM5 (2011)
Spotty toadstools meet traditional Swedish red and white wooden houses in the
spraycan graffiti urban mural behind Alla Fagra (‘All Fair’) on the cover of
their third album. Retro-hippyish in image, this CD and its fine predecessors
Våta Pussar (reviewed in fR 314/315) and Klacken I Nocken remind of
the liberating fun of the flowery days.
Dan Svensson plays percussion, härjedalspipa and more,
and he and harpist Julia Westberg take the lead vocals, with fiddle and viola
d’amore from Olof Göthlin, Gabriel Hermansson’s Swedish bouzouki and acoustic
bass guitarist Per Svensson.
The free-spiritedness is fortified with remarkably
smart instrumental playing and arranging acuity that draws on the wisdom
accumulated during the past four decades of Sweden’s folk music scene, in
original songs crossing and combining the impelling, varied rhythmic and melodic
shapes of polska, slångpolska, minuet, polka, gangar, schottis, engelska,
finnskogpols and waltz.
The catchy lyrics speak of such as festivals in the
park, post-festival emptiness, summer selection of partners, the falafel stand
as the star of Malmö cuisine, and a rhyming of Bahamas and pyjamas. The sound is
colourful and varied, in some ways a cousin in acoustic muscularity and swing to
that pioneered by influential fellow Malmö band Filarfolket.
Perhaps some of the band’s differentness from others in
Sweden stems from the fact they’ve developed not in such folk-scene heartlands
as Dalarna, Stockholm or Uppland, but in the burgeoning and international port
city of Malmö on Sweden’s southern tip, just across the Öresund bridge/tunnel
from Copenhagen, and they celebrate their home. Indeed one track is “A love song
for the multicultural Mecca in Malmö”. Alla Fagra make Malmö folk music.
The witty videos at
www.allafagra.com will help explain.
www.playingwithmusic.se
© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
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