On the title track to Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør’s sixth record, Blómi, this assurance is the negotiation between lovers; “It’s no wonder you’re cryin’ / It feels like we’re dyin’” she attempts to comfort on the chorus. Deeply wrung piano keys and saxophone solos aside, this is terribly discomforting for a song to admit, but resolutely honest in our slow march off the edge. Blømi leaves solutions for our current problems back in the times where they could have been useful. This can only be music as morphine: a painkiller mixed with transcendental meditation.
Bookended by well-intentioned metaphysical rambling, the core songs of the record are ballads steeped in hindsight and aged quickly in the present inferno. This isn’t love, this is love-in-the-face-of: “Alyosha,” “Blømi,” “Rūnā,” and “Náttsongr,” must find the time for romantics while the horsemen descend, and they do. Sundfør doesn’t let doom defy appreciation, it crystalizes how we feel. Subverting the traditional ballad structure this record is a clinic in, centerpiece “Leikara Ljóð” creates a harmonic mountain from a molehill. Laden with handclaps and a sea of Susannes shouting “This is my final call,” this track may be the most joyful reminder of our own mortality likely to be heard this decade: a ritual entrance into heaven.
“Fare Thee Well” is a forlorn, archetypal ballad that tricked me into looking up who had ‘originally’ written it; it was not a cover, despite my insistence it was ‘too good’ to just be written now. Its harmonies and chord changes felt not cliché but eternal, like this track, in all of its romantic sadness, had existed long before its time. In a way it had, as Sundfør began writing this track at the age of 19. Why it rears its head here is much of the same reason we’ve arrived here as well: solutions keep getting away from us. A broken heart is a good thing to have, it moves effortlessly through time and may just be around after the fire.
