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Written in fRoots issue 358, April 2013


VALKYRIEN ALLSTARS & VARIOUS ARTISTS
Norge, Mitt Norge…?
Kirkelig Kulturverksted FXCD 380 (2012)

The band is Valkyrien Allstars, but this isn’t an Allstars album as such. A range of writers have taken the lyrics of songs well known to everyone in Norway, including traditional songs, Grieg and the national anthem, rewritten them in witty, punning ways to reflect today’s Norway, and the Valkyriens plus guests provide the arrangements and backings for a slew of invited singers from across Norwegian music. The album, released on Norway’s flag-bedecked, band-marching, children’s-parading national day, comes in a shiny, celebratory gold digipak emblazoned with a teardrop of black, black oil.
     Here, from the press release’s English translation of the Norwegian liner notes, is what it’s all about:
     “Can we speak of owning a country in a time when people have many connections and belong in many places, with many cultures in their blood and soul? Is a country free when its borders are closed to most people? Does Norway embrace diversity when we have a rigid immigration policy and when new technology undermines a viable broad cultural life?
     “These are questions raised by the songs on this album, which was recorded in the old parliamentary room at Bygdøy in Oslo, the room where the concept of Norway as an independent state was hammered out from 1814 to 1854.”
     A typically Norwegian piece of enlightened reflection and questioning, and, again typically Norwegianly, it’s impeccably put together and produced. No strident politicking, it’s an album that makes a good listen even without understanding of the lyrics or what’s been done to them.
     There’s beautiful, characterful singing throughout, including Solveig Slettahjell’s serene authority, vulnerable huskiness from Trond Granlund, the tortured vocal of Sudan Dudan’s Anders Røine with a wild accompaniment in Håvard Hedd, gnawa/chaabi singer and instrumentalist Aissa Tobi, and the Colm Wilkinson in Les Miserables -like baritone of Viggo Sandvik. The reworking of the national anthem by producer and KKV founder Erik Hillestad, a long-time worker internationally for human rights, is sung by the gay male choir Oslo Fagottkor (not, as the press release’s translation has it, “The Oslo Bassoon Choir”).
     The arrangements are full of elegant subtlety, calmly and expertly folding together traditional and other musics with no clunking joins; Valkyrien Allstars, particularly stereotype-busting singer and hardanger-fiddler Tuva Livsdattar Syvertsen, have come a long way and become quite a figurehead in today’s Norway, challenging and tying together Norwegians’ own view, positive or negative, of fiddles and rural tradition with today’s urban realities.
     “The album is a political torch asking us to re-examine Norwegian identity”, the mission statement goes on to say, “while it also attacks the belief that art and particularly music should be freely available to audiences on the internet. The CD price will reflect 1990 prices. It can be downloaded song by song, but will not be available for streaming until one year after its release.”  Take that, Spotify!

www.kkv.no


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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