Yesterday was a day when four wonderful new albums were released to comfort me through a bad dose of flu which kept me off work. Dream Syndicate, The National, Alvvays and this. So first to Susanne Sundfor's Music For People in Trouble, (the title in itself makes it worthy of notice), which may well be the peach I'll end up valuing most.
Probably not incredibly well-known except for those in the know, though that might be about to change. Having made a small splash recently at a Scott Walker Prom Evening at the Royal Albert Hall, where in many peoples eyes she stole the show, this record should help Sundfor capitalise on that. This is an exercise in the classic European songwriting tradition. Partially inspired by a trip she made before recording the album which took her through North Korea and the Amazonian rainforests among other stopping points the album reaps the harvest of that journey and the experiences it visited upon her.
This is a sad record, in the way that so many of the richest, deepest records are. Marked by sparse, minimal instrumentation, clipped, thoughtful songwriting and Sundfor's quite beautifully pure voice, the icing on the cake. It almost brought me to tears at points though they would have been tears of happiness or it might just have been the bad germs circulating around my system. In any case, the closest thing I've found to a cure for the flu in the past couple of days.
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