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Written in fRoots issue 347, 2012


VALKYRIEN ALLSTARS
Ingen Hverdag
Heilo HCD 7270 (2012)

In their earlier days I couldn’t join the hall-packing enthusiasm in Norway for the Valkyriens. While all three are skilled players of hardingfele, helping carve a new popular role for their instrument, I didn’t warm to their effective but over-used trademark rockabilly-bluegrass fiddle shuffle, and was distanced by the in-your-face rock-cabaret-belter stance of Tuva Livsdatter Syvertsen’s vocals.
     Then came 2009’s To Måner, sadly not sent for review, which, it turns out as I listen now having acquired a copy, is a big production, a rich, constantly interesting mix from big hefty folk-rockishness through a bunch of other approaches, that proved there’s a lot more to them.
     The hardingfele shackles having been proved to be breakable to general acclaim, this new one, Ingen Hverdag, is a balanced, varied, often subtle album in which Tuva, while calling on full-blast when it’s needed, delivers a wide range of vocals, even delicate.
     She’s flanked as ever by co-fiddlers and singers Ola Hilmen and Erik Sollid, the trio joined on the CD, as generally live, by a double-bassist and drummer. The reassuringly-named Sollid, as I became aware when I saw him playing at Folkelarm with Sigrid Bråten Berg (a very promising singer well worthy of her well-known mother Kirsten), is not only a sensitive fiddler but an attractive singer capable of rising smoothly into falsetto. He brings that to this album, not only in backing vocals but taking the lead on one of the songs for which he wrote the melody, the bulk of the rest being the work of the dynamic and talented Tuva, using lyrics either from Norwegian poets or tradition.
     Critic converted.

www.grappa.no. UK distributor Proper.


© 2012 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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