When you get Ivar Bjørnson of Viking metal progressive icons Enslaved and Einar Selvik of atmospheric folk mavericks Wardruna you expect a lesson in sheer class. You also expect intelligence and thought. If you’ll excuse the quoting, the birth and subject is best explained in their own words: “Our collaborating work on the album has been a long journey that started first as writing a commissioned concert piece that was performed at the 200 year anniversary for the Norwegian constitution in 2014….The song ‘Skuggsjá’ or ‘The Mirror’ summons the listener to reflect. To ask, look and listen through the eyes and ears of past and present, as individuals first then as people. It´s about how we often timber our collective history on grounds shaped by religious or political agenda rather than reality and how that affects the solidness of its structure.”
Serious stuff. Serious music too. What it doesn’t perhaps tell you is what a perfect, simple joy this album is. A joy to hear two exemplary musicians immersed in a labour of love and bringing all their craft and experience to the piece. From the variety of traditional and electric instruments set around each other with sympathy, to the superb melding of lead and harmony vocals, Skuggsjá is simply something to marvel at.
As you might expect, though blending folk, rock and metal this is hard to pin down musically. It moves so smoothly from folk and beautiful unaccompanied vocals, to chants that Dead Can Dance would die for and into deeply atmospheric black/pagan metal passages with the flavour of early Enslaved and …In The Woods that an entire world is slowly crafted around you before you notice. It is a place where it feels as though lessons and tableaus from the past are slowly teased from cold mists to act out now, again, against a modern backdrop. Keyboards move subtly around passages, a clear production keeps the acoustic strings sharp and clear and when the more extreme metal elements rise it is sympathetic not sudden. In fact it rises and moves across the piece in the same perfectly judged manner that Winterfylleth bring to their music; a sense of the age of lands and peoples speaking through time.
Although there is no doubt that this has individual, unique songs with not a weak one amongst them, it is all very much a mood piece as a whole, an inspired and indicate design, woven into a warm cloth with deft fingers and more than a little magic whispered between the threads. The kind of art that deserves the vinyl and art book box set treatment and a warm fire and a dark beer to set yourself adrift in.
In short, this is a deep, arthroscopic journey in the hands of exemplary composers in live with their art and their muse. You may hear music as good this year but a doubt there will be any better.
Anyone lucky enough to be going to the unique Middgardsblot festival this year is going to have a musical experience like no other when this is performed in the Viking hall. Wish I was going too.
Simply brilliant.
(9.5/10 Gizmo)
https://www.facebook.com/SkuggsjaNO
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