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Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, "Melody Mountain"
By my account, both at the time and retrospectively, List of Lights and Buoys was the best album of 2004. This follow-up reprises that exquisite debut's delicate melancholia as minimal, often radical, re-interpretations of classic and, at times, even sacred material. How well it accomplishes that is another story altogether.As before, Susanna Karolina Wallumrød's lovely voice quivers with an enthralling fragility through the peaks and valleys of obscenely eclectic track selections from such disparate artists as Kiss, Prince, and Scott Walker. Morten Qvenvild takes more than just liberties with his sparse, subtly decorated arrangements, though some of these compositions come across as more surprising than others. Joy Division's eternal "Love Will Tear Us Apart" has suffered in the feeble, fumbling hands of countless moody impersonators and descendants, with the Magical Orchestra's take slogging along predictably, as does Qvenvild's saggy, dreary stab at the equally overexposed Depeche Mode staple "Enjoy The Silence." Conversely, AC/DC's fist-pumping rock n roll warning, "It's A Long Way To The Top" transmutates into the bitter lament of the road-weary, hardened soul, its once-anthemic lyrics made infinitely more harsh than the late Bon Scott would have envisioned. Along those lines, Wallumrød magnificently reclaims Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" from the gooey depths of Shrek's CGI schmaltz, showcasing the highest heights of her vocal range over Qvenvild's ascetic organ tones.
Still, the strongest and most beautiful material on the duo's first Rune Grammofon record wasn't the creative covers of Leonard Bernstein and Dolly Parton songs, but rather heartbreaking originals like "Hello" and "Believer." As such, Melody Mountain deflects lyrical honesty, behaving much like a depressed girlfriend on the other end of the telephone, singing other people's songs into the receiver for fear of speaking of her own pain and heartache.
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