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Written in fRoots issue 280, 2006


GJALLARHORN
Rimfaxe
Westpark CD 87130 (2006)

With some bands a series of line-up changes mean a decline; in Gjallarhorn’s case, it’s the very opposite; after three preceding very fine albums, with Rimfaxe they treat Nordic traditional music as it’s never been treated before.
      The team is now Finlands-Svensk singer and fiddler Jenny Wilhelms, Adrian Jones (Swedish despite the name) on viola and quarter-tone-fretted mandola and two new members since the last album, both Swedish: percussionist Petter Berndalen and flute and recorder player Göran Månsson. It’s hard to believe, given the hefty bass sounds on the album and live, that there’s no bassist; all the bass and some of the percussion come from an instrument previously confined to early music and never used in this way before: Månsson’s sub contrabass recorder, a six-foot long rectangular tube covered in keys and fitted with multiple external and internal mics.
      Recorded as usual in Finland by fifth member, producer/engineer Martin Kantola, most of the tracks were then mixed in Florida by Bruce Swedien, Quincy Jones’ engineer and producer/engineer of Jennifer Lopez and Michael Jackson. With its mighty sound, all coming from acoustic instruments, including orchestral surges from the St Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic, it might be assumed that the band are moving further and further into a commercial arena; if they are, the music they’re taking there is ever deeper into Nordic tradition, with no concessions to simpler rhythms, fewer microtones or greater ‘accessibility’, just powerful, subtle playing and arranging from musicians with deep knowledge of traditional music and state-of-the- art but natural-sounding production, surrounding vocals from Wilhelms that leave no doubt that she’s in the first rank of Nordic traditional singers.
      The title track comprises verses from the 10th-century Icelandic Elder Edda describing a competition in knowledge between Odin and the wisest of the giants, there’s a Finnish bonfire ritual runo-song, a Finlands-Svensk version of the "Two Sisters" ballad, a Swedish ballad of a magic horse sung to a Norwegian tune, a hymn from the Swedish settlement in the Ukraine to a Norwegian psalm tune, a Norwegian ballad of a prince rescuing his sister from a mermaid, a couple of Norwegian stevs, two tunes from Finlands-Svensk fiddler Johan Erik Taklax, a Finlands-Svensk ballad about Herod’s stable-boy St Stephen, an improvisation around the wild shrill kulning (cow-calling) of which Wilhelms is a very striking exponent, and an Irish Gaelic sean-nós song accompanied by a Swedish shepherd’s-pipe tune. Hardly the obvious stuff to make large-scale breakthrough success, but Gjallarhorn have it in them to do just that with it.


© 2006 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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