GRIMBORG

This third long player of the Finnish-Swede world music group was my first encounter with them. They combine Scandinavian folk music with more exotic oriental musical elements like didgeridoos, djembes and such, creating pleasant musical patterns and an enchanting realm of sounds. Jenny Willhelms' gentle voice is soothing thing to listen to, and often violin driven melodic numbers are enriched with thick layers of percussions, making the music being quite strong and drawing all of the listener's concentration. There are both uplifting and melancholic constructed traditional songs here, and few more ethereal atmospheric numbers like a cow-call and didgeridoo solo number. For a comparison to something else, this album sounded slightly as a more tamer and sophisticated version of Garmarna's first EP to me. The rawness of that album pleased me little more than this record, but nevertheless "Grimborg" is still also very good and a recommendable album, and the other albums of Gjallarhorn are on my listening queue. As an anecdote, there's a similar "hidden picture illusion" in the inner sleeve of the album cover, like in the Änglagård's "Epilog" cover, forming a vision of a face appearing from a forest landscape.