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Written in fRoots issue 229, 2002
 

MARI BOINE
Eight Seasons / Gávcci Jahkejuogu
Jazzland / Universal Music 017 019-2 (2002)

A new Boine album after a four-year pause, apart from last year’s Remixed, and it starts well – here’s that distinctive Boine joik-inflected voice, a meld of Sámi and Native American melodic and vocal styles, with one of her brooding, incanting melodies. But oh, damn, to over-emphasise it in comes smacking the corny repetitive language of a mundane 4/4 boom-chacka programmed beat. Then some more humane filling out, and Jan Garbarek in his one-track guest appearance delivering capable but all-purpose breathy tenor sax that expands to a squealy solo break.
      While the robots do periodically thump and click back in to pester and grey it with urban ordinary-ness, and some of the lyrics seem less meaningful than their delivery (particularly so when in a couple of tracks she sings them partly in English), the rest of the album, while not really progressing her music, has much of the powerfully appealing characteristic Boine, blending massive sound-shapes and subtle spaciousness in a minimalist northern landscape.
      Long-time allies guitarist Roger Ludvigsen and flute player Carlos Z. Quispe, members of the long-lived and magnificent previous Mari Boine Band that split some time ago, are still key team members here. The programmed beats sitting like junk-mail in the snow seem to be mostly the work of producer Bugge Wesseltoft, keyboard player and Jazzland boss, who according to the press release is probably the one who persuaded Boine to forsake her previous resistance to them.
      Sometimes it’s hard to know where to go next, and this is an OK album with some high points, but surely she hasn’t come this far in evolving a special place in the world for distinctive Sámi rock music and language just to give in to the ordinary now.


© 2002 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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