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Written in fRoots issue 237, 2003


GJALLARHORN
Grimborg
Vindauga VDMCD802 (2002)

This new Gjallarhorn release is more dense in texture than its two predecessors, a complex interplay of the twining lines of Jenny Wilhelms’ voice and fiddle and Adrian Jones’ viola or mandola over percussion and the animal grunt, shriek and pulse of Tommi Mansikka-Aho’s didge.
      There have been two personnel changes since Sjofn: Christopher Öhman has moved on to an orchestral job, to be replaced by Jones who, despite his name, is Swedish, and Sara Puljula (of Spontaani Vire) has now replaced David Lillkvist as percussionist, though he and guest Patrick Lax play on the album.
      The band has always performed some material from the Scandinavian ballad tradition that dates back into the middle ages, but this time that’s the main focus, particularly ballads involving transformation and the path through the underworld or subconscious. The lyrics are, naturally, in Swedish, and there are no translations give, apart from of the titles, in the CD pack, presumably following, like Lena Willemark, the principle that if they’re done right the sound of the music and words should communicate plenty. Well, it does, but it can’t be denied that the listening experience is different for non-speaker than it is for a speaker of the language. It becomes purely a matter of form, texture and spirit. Given that ballad tunes tend to be insistently narrative, variations in melody or rhythm stemming from the rhythm and shape of the words, rather than celebratorily melodic, while there’s no doubting the great musical maturity and meaning here, and the advances the band continues to make, for a foreigner there’s, well, less to hum.
      Even the instrumentals, apart from Jones’ reflective viola solo which forms the final track, have a similarly tight weave of instrumentation, and it opens out into spaciousness relatively rarely, mainly in the second half of the album, as it does in the interplay between Wilhelms’ voice and guest Ian Blake’s soprano sax and bass clarinet over Jones’ microtonally-fretted mandola on Ella-Lilla or with Jones’ mellow arpeggiating viola in the hymn Ack Lova Gud. Splendid microtonal fiddling precedes and responds to Wilhelms’ always thrilling high-pitched kulning in the track titled (cow-calling being, given the conversational skills of its original recipients, wordless and therefore nameless), Kulning.


© 2003 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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