- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in Folk Roots issue 151/152, 1996

BUKKENE BRUSE
Åre
Grappa GRCD 4100 (1995)

Much meatier than the trio’s 1993 debut album, Åre is more instrumentally-oriented than its predecessor. There’s more energy here, in Annbjørg Lien and Arve Moen Bergset’s hardingfeler, nyckelharpa and fiddle and Steinar Ofsdal’s flutes, more light and shade and passion in all the playing and singing; the feeling of neat correctness has largely gone, as has the distancing limpid cathedral reverb which on the previous album combined with Bergset’s soaring tenor to give a best-behaviour, ecclesiastical atmosphere. (There’s a strong church music strand in Norwegian folk song, and whether or not as a result of that, many of the highest-profile, commercially-recorded singers, male and female, tend to sound “trained”. There are other folk styles, though, some with the same sort of feel as Scottish traditional singers; for recordings of them, try NRK/Grappa’s encyclopaedic 10-CD set Norsk Folkemusikk, which hasn’t yet thudded onto the FR review mat.)
      The intensification of that Norwegian floating modality and high, silvery sound is evident in Ofsdal’s playing - more of the feel of the no-holed seljefløyte overtone flute and breathiness of the sjøfløyte, less of the recorder. There’s gutty drive where it’s needed from footstamp and Ofsdal’s occasional bowed bass, and the band is augmented by Bjørn Ole Rasch and Kåre Nordstoga’s acoustic-sounding, mostly pipe-organish keyboards. From a British Isles point of view it’s a shame, though, that, while The Fair-Haired Child (An Páistín Fionn) is by way of a tribute to one of their inspirations, Micho Russell, they chose a not particularly notable instrumental rendition of the oft-heard Irish song The Foggy Dew as the final track of an album of otherwise distinctively Norwegian music. OK, it’s their album, they can play it if they like it, but why as the closer, which is the tune most likely to ring in the memory?


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.

CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -