Mari Kvien Brunvoll and Stein Urheim with Moskus – Barefoot In Bryophyte

Hubro

Nordic travellers Stein Urheim and Mari Kvien Brunvoll have played together on and off for some years now, their delightful vocal duet a magical salve to the current malaise.

Bringing on board tricky trio Moskus to add some unscripted textures to some recently recorded songs is a recipe for genre-dodging if ever there was one. The quintet knows absolutely no boundaries and over the course of this forty-five or so minutes, they play the field as if trying to break the Guinness World Record for most diverse album.

There is no escaping the sunny dispositions of the players and the opening track’s acoustic intro and dreamy vocalising moves in a lullaby manner, the clipped guitar — highlife via Norway — and jaunty, forthright rhythm eventually picking up a medieval flautist along the way. Phew and this is only track one.

The instrumentation is vastly different for each of the nine tracks here, with each player bringing a minimum of three instruments to the session, not including the sublime vocals. There is a sense of intricacy to the tracks here, a kind of neatness that is somehow allied to freedom and whether they are revelling in some eighteenth century court drama or throwing improv electronics over a lumpy, funky backing, they are clearly having fun.

“Paper Fox” is a dramatic piano ballad that turns into a widescreen desert epic with tired horse percussion stirring high in the mix, while the unsure pop of “Fenomenolodi” slides into the free-form eruption of “Yellow Flower”. Here, they take everything that came before and jumble it up, throwing it around like confetti then smoothing it into a delightful tippy-toe dusting. There are moments of real drama, with swollen sounds echoing off unseen vistas. They can’t seem to keep still and the tracks quite often move through phases, changing tempo and direction at the drop of a hi-hat.

On “So Low”, the long, sad sweeps of guitar are at odds with doomy piano and scattered flickers of what sounds like another, entirely different, guitar; and the more you listen and work through the album, the stronger and more emotional the songwriting appears. The sweetness of the vocals somehow reflects back on the unusual song structures and they certainly know how to tickle the heart, particularly on the aching yearn of closer “Limits”, which gives you alternating perspectives on how to break a heart.

This is an extraordinary step for a first album, but one that will give you more and more the longer you live with it.

-Mr Olivetti-