Sometimes, record labels don’t like what those on their roster have recorded. Such was the case with BMG Sweden and Robin Carlsson who, as Robyn, had made three albums with varying success and a raft of home-country hit singles for the label from the mid-Nineties to 2002.
During the opening seconds of Mirra, an unusual sound leaps out – a grunting. It’s integral to a shifting aural pallete which also features a bowed violin and chiming percussion along with a recurring grind like that of a rotating waterwheel. The mood is chilly, suggesting an environment where unalloyed nature has the upper hand, a place where the seasons define what comes to pass.
Ready to Live a Lie is so sonically vaporous it almost isn’t there. While the album’s 11 tracks draw from continental European musical archetypes – specifically Italian disco and Eurovision-styled balladry – there is little solidity which can be grasped. The wispy clouds in the album’s cover image are emblematic.
Danish singer MØ is a paradox. Initially she appeared to be another Scandi electro-pop princess of the bangers. The monster 2015 hit “Lean On” with Major Lazer jacked her profile, briefly, through the roof, but, while she’s worked with everyone from Iggy Azalea to DJ Benny Benassi, she seemed to step sideways from pure pop, tempering it with something more Nordic and melancholy. Her fourth album persuasively continues in this direction.
The titular “lighthouse of glass” is a place where the narrator is “crying into the sun,” in which there is a need to “stand by my solitude.” Choosing isolation and self-determination are themes running throughout Lighthouse of Glass the album and how Sweden’s Sofia Härdig has approached recording these 10 songs. As well as the songwriter, she is the arranger, engineer, producer and main instrumentalist.
A pizzicato violin opens Song Over Støv. Gradually, other instruments arrive: bowed violin, a fluttering flute, pattering percussion, an ominous double bass. They merge. The climax is furious, intensely rhythmic. Suddenly, it is over.
In 1964, the Norwegian division of Philips Records began issuing singles labelled “Bergen Beat.” The picture sleeves of 45s by Davy Dean and the Swinging Ballades, Sverre Faaberg and the Young Ones, The Jokers, Rune Larsen and Teen Beats, The Quartermasters, Helge Nilsen and the Stringers and Tornado bore a bold stamp recognising each band’s origin in the country’s second city.
The exhortations don’t seem necessary as the audience is already letting off the steam which has built up in anticipation of a full-bore show. Nonetheless, The Courettes’ Flávia Couri knows higher levels of excitement are there to be tapped, that it’s possible to get the crowd to liberate themselves from any restraint they may have left. Limits are there to be pushed.
Born Horses remains as inscrutable as it was when it was issued in the summer. While it is about the search for enlightenment through journeying into inner space, much of what’s described – the album’s words are largely spoken – is allegorical, coming across as beatnik-style reportage documenting a form of psychedelic experience.
Springs begins cooking with “Spaced Out Invaders - Part I Quirks,” its fourth track. A spindly, rotating guitar figure interweaves with clattering percussion and pulsating electric bass. Around three minutes in, a sax – which, until this point, has kept in the background – begins whipping up a maelstrom. Overall, the effect conjured is that of a space rock-inclined exotica, Martin Denny had he been an early Seventies freak.