Album review | Norwegian star Susanne Sundfør’s new album is great to listen to but an unworthy work of art

Pop / Album

Susanne Sundfør: Blómi. Warner.

★★★

The streaming revolution has done surprisingly well for the album format. It has forced to justify the form artistically. In practice, this means that more and more ambitious new albums are, in the old folk’s words, “theme albums”.

So is the Norwegian by Susanne Sundfør novelty BlómiOld Norse for blossoming.

In his home country, Sundfør is a big star, whose artistically uncompromising music does well in the charts and wins over local moms. In addition to that, he has managed to create an international indie career, which has brought him to places the size of the Savoy Theater and the Huvila tent in Finland.

In Finland’s current music climate, a corresponding artist profile seems impossible.

Sundfør works as ambitious pop artists who like the artist class tend to do these days. The production is not tied to genres, but each album is completely its own artistic entity, which does not have to have anything to do with its predecessors.

Sundfør broke through in 2010 when he was only 24 years old The Brothel on his album, which the over-composed songwriting music reminded About Kate Bush and About Joanna Newsom. The year 2015 Ten Love Songs – album, he was already a synth romantic who had listened to Depeche Mode, until 2017’s Music for People in Trouble turned to folk.

With Blóm Sundfør is interested in the same legends of the early 1970s, About Carole King and About Joni Mitchell like many others in recent years. There is a grand piano, saxophone solos, and other precious things. Built around a lullaby-like humming melody The surgeon ljóðin clapping, choruses and clatters bring to mind Fiona Apple’sand the song ends Arthur Russell to a reminiscent cello sketch.

Fortunately, the music doesn’t feel American, so much of the song melodies have an Abba-like pathos.

“

The trend topic of recent times is family roots.

Blómi is easy and great to listen to, but worthless art. Theme album thinking has exposed pop to the snobbery of other art fields, to forced programming and jargon, which is used to try to explain what is important about the work and what is intelligent and social about its creator.

The trend topic of recent times is family roots, and also Blómin the theme is Sundfør’s grandfather and daughter. In practice, it means the hilariously empty buzzwords that have nothing to do with the music included in the album’s accompaniment: ancestors, Nordic indigenous peoples, matrilinealism, feminine goddesses, Old Norse, bingo!

Ṣānnu yārru liIn the song ̄, Sundfør reads his grandfather’s disputed linguistic research material, in German. So contrived and unintelligent that it does harm.