FIRE FORTELLINGER

I can't imagine this album not being my record of the year for 2023. Lars Fredrik Froislie is a bad man. Hey I love that he's so serious in all the pictures I see of him it reminds me of another bad man Gerard Hourbette from ART ZOYD, just look at the two pictures in their bio here for example. Anyway I was really looking forward to this but I also had reservations given that this was all Lars except for the bass.

Well my appreciation for this man has blown up after spending the past week with this album. His vocals have such character and that's what you want when you have an album of stories. There's a cool picture of Lars holding a huge story book in the liner notes. And how about the four pictures on the album cover representing those four stories. I mean the art work for story books back in my day were not of this quality, each picture is so beautiful in it's own way.

There's another interesting picture of Lars and about a dozen banks of keyboards surrounding him in the liner notes. His M400 mellotron gets put to good use here along with an array of keyboards of course. And I have to mention Nikolai Haengsle from ELEPHANT9 playing a lot of his Fender basses but also that nasty Rickenbacker. I'm such a huge bass fan and it was so wise of Lars to bring him in because he is all over this album and the importance of his input can't be stressed enough.

This is an album where I run out of adjectives trying to describe it. The last one like this for me was SHAMBLEMATH's "II" album from late in 2021. We get two long tracks of just under 17 minutes each and the two shorter ones both under 7 minutes.

The opener "Rytter Av Dommedag" features the most beautiful and memorable of melodies that comes and goes. The song opens with some power, quite dramatic. Man I love the sound of the keys on here at times bringing RPI to mind. This is just a joy to listen to and we get those contrasts and repeated themes over the 17 minutes. I should have mentioned given the song titles that Lars sings in Norwegian.

The second track features more beautiful atmospheres with mellotron and Lars voice is especially good on this one. The bass is insane after 2 1/2 minutes. "Jaertegn" has those amazing keyboard sounds as it hits the ground running. Vocals and huge bass lines too. A calm and synths lead for a while.

"Naturens Katedral" ends it and it's surprisingly heavy with vocals to start and mid-paced. It turns mellow and these contrasts continue. Check out the mellotron 8 minutes in. Oh my! Some nasty experimental sounds 10 minutes that are amazing before the tempo picks up and vocals return before it settles once again.

Well we have that new JORDSJO coming out in October and Hakon from that band along with Lars are also on that new THE CHRONICLES OF FATHER ROBIN record due to come out next month. But I can't imagine either beating this one out.