Album: Susanna - Meditations on Love

For a record whose subject matter involves unfaithfulness, ageing, loneliness, fear of death, darkness, sorrow, battles, haunting, sleeplessness and struggling to breathe, this is a lot of fun. But then Susanna Wallumrød has always leavened fathomless darkness with wry wit.

Early on in her career she was covering songs like Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and even Kiss’s “Crazy Crazy Nights” as icy ballads, and throughout she has always had an arch cool that has allowed her to gaze into the abyss and relay what its gaze says back to her as startlingly enjoyable music.

On this album, that enjoyment comes above all from beautiful placement and production of percussive sounds. Chimes, bells, marimbas, boinking piano bass notes all bounce around one another in a way that feels heavily influenced by Tom Waits in his junkyard percussion phase, but isn’t simply derivative but dances around Wallumrød’s unique phrasing and relentlessly mind-grabbing hooks in its own particular way. There's a jazz groove, even perhaps an electronic dance sensibility, but it's its own, odd, skeletal thing.

And that phrasing, and her strength and purity of tone, bounce in turn off that instrumentation like someone having a good deal of fun with their talent and that of their collaborators. There’s a sense of cabaret to it all, of facing the darkness, naming it and describing it, and dancing into the night with it without care for what might come tomorrow, just relishing the moment. Because that kind of experience is a meditation, and when the archness is balanced with as much sincerity of musicianship and expression as you get here, it can be a shared meditation. The potentially endless sadness that comes with love and its loss, when shared and understood together can illuminate the complexities of what it is to be human, and even, yes, in its way be fun.

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@joemuggs

Listen to "Everyone Knows"