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Written in fRoots issue 208, 2000


GJALLARHORN
Sjofn
Ranarop RANARCD-1 (2000)

Three years on from their very attractive debut album Ranarop Gjallarhorn, having declined a further Warner Finlandia contract, forge onward with Sjofn, showing how comprehensively they can achieve when they gather the whole process of album making and releasing into their own hands.
      Jenny Wilhelms convinces ever more that she’s one of Norden’s very finest singers, with wide tonal facility from silky low register to thrilling kulning, and the time she’s spent digging into archives has borne fruit in terms both of the finding of a store of traditional material and of a burgeoning of her own ability to create melodies for texts.
      Making big, shivering slabs of sound from acoustic instruments, the instrumental lineup, as before, comprises Christopher Öhman’s viola and mandola driving in tandem with Wilhelms’ fiddle and hardingfele, plus David Lillkvist’s percussion and, supplying the shifting-textured rhythmic-pulsed drones that so suit in this context, didgeridoo and jew’s harp player Tommy Mansikka-Aho (who replaced Jakob Frankenhaeuser just after the first album was recorded). No bassist, but there’s no sense of lack; the didges, mandola and deeply resonant skin and udu percussion make a rich-textured bottom end while allowing this music of lyric, melody and rhythm to float free from specific bass harmonisation.
      Here’s runo-song, hymn, minuet, polska and several ballads, largely Swedish-language but also in Finnish and Icelandic - indeed this Finlands-Svensk band goes where musicians in Iceland itself still don’t show much sign of treading, with a strong version of an Icelandic rune poem about the forces of nature as personified in giants, elves and norns.
      If mention of mythological beings evokes dread, fear not; this is full-blooded, gutsy beauty, not fey Nordic-twilight mystification. Even the final track, stemming from Jenny’s revelatory delight in swimming with dolphins in Australia, is no wafty piece of new-agery but a robustly structured contemporary extension of runo-song nature-poetry into a realm outside the experience of the old versifiers. “From within seven open waters, from under the ninth wave, to sport with the lively whale, to ride the stream-swimmer”.
      The crisp and inventive production is, as on Ranarop, by Martin Kantola with Wincent Högberg. And the packaging would win prizes.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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