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Written in Folk Roots issue 150, 1995

GROUPA
Imeland
Amigo AMCD 730 (1995)

GUNNFJAUNS KAPELL
Naudljaus
Sjelvar SJECD 9 (1995)

Five years after the wild, fierce collaboration with Lena Willemark, Månskratt, here’s a new Groupa album, the band’s fifth. In the course of shuffling and reassortment of musicians among leading Swedish bands, only two members of the 1995 band remain, founder-member fiddler Mats Edén and flutes/bass sax player Jonas Simonson, joined as a quartet by percussionist Tina Johansson and keyboardist Rickard Åström.
      The sound has changed, of course: no vocals (but Groupa until Månskratt had been an instrumental band), and no wall of driving saxes, instead a more spacious sound - Edén’s distinctive droney fiddle or viola d’amore, harmonic and finger-holed flutes, some keyboard bass and bass sax, with Johansson’s berimbau, gatham, talking drum, cymbals and other percussion.
      The format of most tracks is statement and improvisatory exploration of a theme, mainly polskas, rejlanders and hallings, the traditional ones largely Norwegian, the others by Edén (whose tunes, conditioned by his personal Swedish-Norwegian cultural background, show up all over the Swedish revival) and Åström. In terms of such a prime mover in Swedish music it seems a bit short of a strong sense of direction, its quota of ideas perhaps diluted by band members’ work in other projects. There’s that danceable Groupa swing, though, and this is the ongoing work of musicians committed to the making of an evolving rooted form which has hugely strengthened Sweden’s musical identity and unembarrassed links with its tradition.

      The opening, title track of Gunnfjauns Kapell’s fourth album (which, confusingly, uses virtually the same sleeve artwork and layout as its CD predecessor, the two-album compilation Sjelvar) is a poem by Gotland poet Gustaf Larsson set to the tune of My Lagan Love, a folk-scene-group sort of thing to do; another song uses the tune of Maid of Colemore, and indeed the band from the Baltic island of Gotland, roughly midway between Stockholm and the Polish coast, ploughs a furrow away from the rockier, fusionist and progressive thrust of the likes of Groupa and nearer to that pan-European Irish-influenced folk-group structure - voice, fiddles, guitar, flute, whistle, bodhran and so on. As a result its overall sound, as the album opens at least, is similar to that of such groups across Europe. Nevertheless, in this collection of traditional Gotland and band-written songs and tunes there’s an attractive spirit, sensitivity and a feeling for melody, singer Gunnel Mauritzson is at home with both Irish and Swedish vocal styles, and the album develops much more assertiveness and character, grainy texture and Swedishness as it proceeds.


© 1995 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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