VISIONS

SOUP is the project of Norway's own Erlend Aastad Viken starting out as a one man band and releasing that debut as such before becoming a four piece on the followup album and expanding to a five piece here on album number six. Erlend takes the time here in the liner notes to do a proper thanks as he puts it to the many who have helped along the way. Mentioning the kids in Volda for rooting for the one man band back in 2005. Mentioning Lasse Hoile as a collaborator since Lasse heard the song "My Justine" on MySpace in 2005. He did the cover art here. There's a couple of guests helping out with strings and flute from GIANT SKY a related band. Like the cover art I find the music to be okay, just not my thing overall but I kept thinking the word "interesting". SOUP seems to forge some new territories or at least changes them up enough to make it interesting. Post Rock with the guitars and powerful sections are contrasted with the folky acoustic guitar, piano and fragile vocal sections. The vocals in that mode remind me of Phil Collins and the sound like GENESIS. My favourite sections are those. We do get build ups like Post Rock but these are quicker.

I have a legit copy and the length of this album is 66:19 and the final song almost 34 minutes not 7 1/2 minutes as shown here and mentioned in other reviews. That final track does go silent at 7:23 but it stays that way for 10 minutes before the music returns and man were just getting started. A FLOYD-like section to open "Burning Bridges" but then that GENESIS pastoral soundscape takes over and later a wall of sound like Post-Rock and this track is a good example of what this album is about. The strings are fairly powerful on "Kingdom Of Color" one of my favourites. "Skins Pt. 1" is a short piano piece. More of the pastoral and later wall of sound on "Crystalline" kind of following the example of the opener.

This one got left far behind in the album of the year voting but that is in part because many didn't get a chance to hear it as it was released late in November. Well worth checking out and for many this is SOUP's best album.