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Written in fRoots issue 192, 1999
 

HEDNINGARNA
Karelia Visa
NorthSide NSD6025 (1999)

GARMARNA
Vedergällningen
Massproduktion/MNW MNW CD-337 (1999)

In a fine return to recorded completeness and direction, Hedningarna has made its most Finnish album yet. Drawing on a works outing to the former Finnish territory of Russian Karelia, the band is using even more than it did before the influence of the Finno-Ugrian runo-songs, which are characterised by narrow-compass tunes of short but shifting melodic patterns and insistent rhythm with no beginning other than starting and no ending other than stopping.
      Runo-song is a window not just on Finno-Ugrian musical culture but on a more widespread old layer of northern European musical culture, ways of hearing and making music that prevailed before the 17th and 18th century arrival of pan-European dance fashions of the polka, minuet and mazurka ilk. Swedish and Norwegian musicians heard the new-come ideas in dance music and interpreted them in terms of their existing tradition, so evolving the distinctive forms of polska, halling, gangar and more. In Hedningarna three Swedish roots musicians and two runo-song-influenced Finnish singers recombine aspects of those old roots, adding in a kindred form, the raw, brooding visceral excitement at the heart of rock or blues.
      Karelia Visa isn’t as shiveringly wall-of-sound as Hedningarna’s previous high-point, Trä, but to repeat that approach would be to conform to type and become trapped by a formula. This time the sounds, while still recorded larger than life and with great richness, are warmer and less overtly processed and triggered. The band has found ways of playing and recording that, while still using non-obvious samples tellingly, draw the wild power essentially from the instruments, the voices, and the arrangements which weave a tight structure around beguiling runolaulu-derived melodic motifs.
      A clear strong influence on the music of Karelia Visa is Sanna Kurki-Suonio, moving ever onwards in creating new Finnish vocal approaches rooted in the old ways - this album seems to reflect her personality even more than does her multi-producer solo album Musta. Her new co-vocalist is Anita Lehtola (from, and still with, Loituma, Tallari and Me Naiset) who has replaced Tellu Virkkala. (Anders Stake appears to have been replaced by one Anders Norudde, but only the surname, not the bagpiper, fiddler and instrument-creator, has changed).

      Meanwhile Garmarna has moved further away from acoustic-instrument sounds and deeper into programmed-sample structures. The first track of Vedergällningen (Vengeance) storms in with the aforementioned wall of sound, and it’s an ever-present looming presence throughout the album as Emma Härdelin’s voice trips a path through a dark, ominous forest in which sunlight occasionally sparkling through the trees, or pauses in a serene but still threatened quiet glade.
      It’s another step on the way for a band with much to offer, the energy to carry through its ideas, and a very healthy young following. It’s a considerable work, and, with increasing familiarity, a grower, but there’s a nagging feeling of emptiness. Portentous sounds seem to be generated because they’re impressive rather than because they actually portend anything, and while the sound quality is indeed big and airily hyper-clear when played rave-loud, there’s something of an aural-exciter-processed lack of body to it that contributes to the impression of this incarnation (if a mythical beast can be said to have one) of Garm as possessing shiny prosthetic canines rather than the blood-dripping, breath-smelling kind.
      Garmarna is increasingly popular abroad, specifically in North America. These traditional Swedish ballads set largely to band-composed music are for many, whether or not they understand the lyrics, an intriguing and mysteriously exciting new discovery of sound and melodic shape, a good modern noise with with root-tendrils winding back into time. And so far the Zone of Manufactured Export Low-Cal Nordic Twilight is barely a dot on the horizon...

      Karelia Visa is on Silence Records, but the copy reviewed here came from NorthSide, the US label releasing under licence in North America many of the hot new Nordic roots albums, including Vedergällningen.


© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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