Geir Sundstøl — Furulund
With an almost sluggish relaxed pace and delicate natural timbres, the mood is reflective. Rather than building energy as post rock traditionally does, many songs often seem to be sinking deeper into stillness. Plaintive luminescent e-bow siren songs drift out of the vaguely rhythmic mire of tonal contrails. It's a ghostly slow blues, spirited slides and bends imbued with neon tracers.
Opener "Din Gamle Arak" is undoubtedly the most energetic and densely composed piece to be found on the album, a spiralling opus of misty mountain folk, a beautiful call and response between mandolin, banjo and guitar, with clever use of tubular bells at one point, as well. After this song, the music becomes progressively more fluid, pensive and drifting, with many of the later tracks composed a single melody repeating in ambient fashion.
It's a good album for the first few minutes of morning, with its conscious use of silence. The tone is gently sobering, encouraging the listener to embrace the sometimes less than pleasurable truth of attachment and loss, but also the depth of the beauty of nature. It evokes imagery of rain droplets migrating down a glass pane. It has the understated feeling of a sad indie film with a faded color scheme. Indeed, Sundstøl's work would be well suited to that context.
His compositions are sweetly and tastefully tuneful, openly emotive and vulnerable, pained almost to the point of being despairing, yet warmly reassuring in their direct cathartic honesty and proudly displayed heart. His notes are always carefully chosen, each harmony allowed to ring out for a second before the next comes, a very thoughtful minimalism I would compare to Dylan Carlson and Earth's later work. Sundstøl stays perhaps too strictly within the realm of minor key consonance for my taste, not quite attaining his own distinctive place in my mind with his beautiful, but somewhat familiar, and always predictably symmetrical, melodies.
He is certainly a master at precisely manipulating tones, and the texture of the album is utterly gorgeous, with creative and subtle use of a variety of instruments, such as the salvi harp, organ and xylophone in addition to those already mentioned earlier. Intelligent panning makes it a three dimensional experience, especially with headphones. Unfortunately, I feel this layered sound comes at the cost of any live feeling the music could have had.
This is more of a studio creation than a captured performance, and the overdubs are not always as rhythmically precise as they could be, resulting in a loose recording without a lot of rhythmic energy. The pieces could have had a bit more movement, often hinting at dramatic climaxes which do not come. The most striking moments come near the beginning of the recording, making it something of an anticlimactic experience. None of the album's 8 pieces make a significant departure in style, and the 35 minutes of the album pass quickly as a wintry blue blur. Given the sleepy tone of the album, it's probably good there's nothing jarring to be found, but a little more variety would certainly have been nice.
An emotional and ear pleasing, but not necessarily engaging record, sunk just a little too deep in its melancholic stupor. It's difficult to rate this one, as I'm sure it would be wonderful to those of the right temperament, rich with consonant musicality as it is. It feels a bit stagnant and maudlin to me, but its melodicism and texture are beyond reproach.