ÓKOMIN FORNESKJAN

First of all: this record isn't available per se. It's part of the excellent þursar box set of the pretty unknown Icelandic progressive rock band þursaflokkurinn. I think you can download it from the Icelandic Tónlist website for a few krónur, but I recommend you to either buy the box set or leave it.

I've already written a few words about the band in the other reviews, so I'm now just going to focus on what you get here.

*A 12-minute 1978 live recording with good sound quality, but some clipping in the louder parts.*

And this part is the obvious highlight of this album, not only because they were previously unissued. With Svífur uppá Silvurhimni you get a pretty heavy song with Townshend-like acoustic guitar strumming, avant-garde electric guitar work, interesting bassoon counterpoints and Égill Ólafssons powerful voice. An energetic progressive folk track with lots of different sections and an inventive arrangement. Sadly the drums appear quieter in the mix than they really are; at places you even wonder if they still appear. Lisú-blus is much more atmospheric, basically a slowly meandering psychedelic track with only faint similarities to the common blues scheme. Again the reverberated lead guitar and the pretty free-form bassoon work add a lot to the surreal atmosphere of this song, as well as the spirited singing. The best comparable tune to this one might be anything off Roy Harper's HQ, for instance Hallucinating Light, although Bill Bruford's 'slim' drum playing style on this particular album is nowhere to be found here.

*A 7-minute radio session from 1979 - very good sound quality, excellent playing.*

And the song the band plays here is the Canterbury-influenced Frá Vesturheimi, featuring flautist Lárus Grímsson. The flute, reminding me of Mr. Jimmy Hastings, reminds me even more of the Waterloo Lily-era Caravan. You should know - I am allergic to bands wanting to sound like other bands. This band isn't one of those candidates since they really pull off their own stuff, and apart from the overly loud bass playing this recording is a treat to listen to.

*Studio demos from a 1980 musical - excellent sound quality, but sometimes a bit too much on the trololo side of the sound spectrum*

I don't know the Icelandic language, but Fram allir vöðvar sounds like a scene of a musical in which a doltish Viking walks around the stage thinking about what to eat. I doubt that this is the real topic of this song, but it all just sounds a bit overdone. I usually really like the sometimes humorous trololo-scatting which Ólafsson always liked doing, perhaps continuing what Samla Mammas Manna had tried before, but this one is too short and too much on the lounge jazz side to really impress me. Sveininn er samningi mundinn is more interesting. More trololo singing, yes, but also more exciting rhythms, funky guitar playing by Árnason and lots of different parts combined seamlessly in hardly three minutes. One could regard this as the transition from the more folk- and progressive rock orientated band outings of the late 1970s to the interesting jazz/new-wave combination of the 1980s output. Sálmur fyrir Gullauga is the ballad version of the song Gegnum holt og hædir, sung and played by Égill Olafsson merely on the grand piano. I hear well-transferred influences of church chorales and torch songs, and this little tune is simply beautiful in its sophisticated composition, although it's far away from the rousing experiments the band was renowned for. A highlight on this CD it is however.

*12 live minutes of a concert in 1981. Similar sound quality to the 1978 stuff, but featuring Olafsson's most commercial songwriting.*

Ánarki is a pretty awful pseudo-punk track which seems to mock anarchy, capitalism, communism etc - I don't know for sure. If it did that based on a reasonably good song idea this would be okay, but this is new wave with a displeasingly bland pop sound. Some nice hooks here and there, okay, but nothing more. Besides, you really feel that the band doesn't feel comfortable playing this stuff - contrary to the more sophisticated new wave material of the Gæti eins verið... album.

Serfrædingar ségja is taken from yonder album, and this recording is pretty exciting since it mixes the bass line and the rhythm of the excellent track Gibbon with the melody of the album version of Serfrædingar ségja. And as soon as the band is back into the more ethereal and rhythmically challenging material they sound much more confident. Also check out the vocal melody which is influenced by jazz through and through.

Harley Davidson is taken from the 1980 Grettír musical, and you know that this comes from a musical as soon as you listen to it. It's a really long and slow ballad with a totally bombastic melody, and pomp clearly isn't what this band is best in - at least when they play as an ensemble of four musicians. It's a decent song, but it drags on quite long due to the minimalistic band lineup - and thankfully the typical 1980s keyboard sound would ameliorate a lot until the 1982 Gæti eins verið album. The description 'slow ballad', anyway, might give you a wrong impression of this song, even though that's what it really is. It's slow in a dark and fairly desperate way without touching the shallowness which slow ballads often suffer from. Shallowness, in fact, is something which you don't ever get from this band at any time. Do check out the version of this song on the gorgeous live album from 2008 which proves the quality of composition in this song. Ólafsson's vocals sound much more mature, and don't overhear the symphonic interplay between bassoon, guitar and Hammond organ.

*And finally the lost fifth album of the band, Ókomin forneskjan... from 1984...*

...and that's a pretty mixed bag. First of all, the keyboards are sufficiently tasteful - much better than what most of the musicians squeezed out of the early polyphonic keyboards at that time. The title track is pretty grand, changing between the church music/jazz-fusion of the verses and the plaintive art pop in the more upbeat chorus. Reuniting with bassoonist Rúnar Vilbergsson for this particular song rooted for the band sound a lot, it might be his contributions which I enjoy most. When listening to this portion of the CD I somehow always feel reminded of Pink Floyd's A Momentary Lapse of Reason in its better moments. Especially the instrumental Hverju a að trúa-Arab could be responsible for this, owing to this certain maritime flavour. It works primarily as an 'ambient' piece, pretty much in the vein of what Signs of Life would do two years later, and it works good. Despite the simplicity of the music in its form it is absolutely successful in conveying the picture of standing on a pier in Iceland at some time in the dark season. Súpa a la carte takes its time to unfold a hopeless mood in a minimalist art pop song. The fact that it still leaves question marks in my head after repeated listenings might also be a result of the unfinished state it is in, most significantly the extended solo drum play-out which ends abruptly after six minutes. Certainly it's a few degrees less stunning than Okomin forneskjan, but still a more than decent track - again since there's a special mood which this song creates. Fjandsamleg navist-III on the one hand is interesting in its mix of funk phrasings and the Nordic raging vocals of Egill Olafsson; in fact the vocals sound completely different from verse to verse, sometimes even sounding similar to German singer Udo Lindenberg! There are lots of interesting dissonances and tightly composed interludes (for instance the nearly majestic part at 1:30), but the sound just doesn't fit in with the gloomy atmosphere of the remaining songs. Of stor fits in better, but it is dull and fails where the ballad Vill einhver elska? from the Gæti eins verið album was a cogent highlight of a more than decent album. This one's a typical 'slow ballad' with obvious commercial intentions which is only partly saved by Ólafsson's spirited singing. It is short, marred by the 'explosive' Foreigner/Scorpions AOR drum sound and by a lack of characterful ideas.

*All the rest*

To keep it short: þögull eins og meirihlutinn in its 1982 live version only gives fans a surplus value over the studio version from Gæti eins verið. It's got the same length, basically the same sounds, it is perhaps a bit more 'punk' because Tomas Tomasson plays the bass guitar instead of the keyboards here. Gegnum holt og hædir, recorded live in 1991 as a tribute to the deceased þursaflokkurinn keyboarder Karl Sighvattson, is a real stunner in this version - again thanks to Rúnar Vilbergsson on bassoon. Emotional singing, stirring but restrained guitar solos, the staccato bassoon helping out on the bass line, fantastic drum playing - I'm glad that this version has been unearthed for this CD.

As I've already mentioned, I cannot recommend this record, but only the þursar box set in which it is featured - and this I recommend heavily. Not many of the bonus CDs in box sets have such a consistent standard of quality, and the other featured albums are even better. Regarding the 4 star realms in here (1978-1979 live recordings, parts of Okomin Forneskjan, the 1991 live recording), the big majority of the 3 star tracks (1980 studio and 1981-1982 live recordings) and the (very few) substandard songs, a rating of about three stars feels just right.