EIGHT WAYS

MADDER MORTEM'S newest album EIGHT WAYS, I heard the song LIFE, LUST & LIBERTY off Classic Rock Presents Prog free cd, and I was thinking about getting this, I eventually saw it in a small music shop and thought 'what the hell' and bought it. The cover is quite strange, I wonder who did it? It consits of a platform with a lever, overlooking hilly mountains, down towards the sea maybe. In the fold out manual, on the flip side is a picture of a heart as a machine which I thought was a nice touch, dunno why it just is.

The vocalist Agnete M. Kirkevaag, itsn't the usual sounding female singer, she's got a really unusual sounding voice but I actually quite like it though as it adds a whole different feel than if it was by say an operatic vocalist, espcially on the softer melodic songs ARMOUR (one of my favorites on the album), THE RIDDLE WANTS TO BE and RESOLUTON. The rest of the band including BP. M. Kirkevaag (the only other original member), are really great musicians and can hold each other well.

The whole album has a weird jazziness to it, thats the only way to describe it really. The structures of the songs are not basic and quite complex. It took a few listens to get used to what was going on and you'll discover little things the more you listen to it. I'm quite intrested as to where this band came from and woudln't mind getting more of their work. There's a certain fun element of highly charged emotional output that really gets your heart pumping (maybe thats the reason for the machine heart)

I'm in a tangent whether of not to give this 3 or 4 stars because I really enjoyed it but I dunno, on the ground that I did I'll give it 4 stars