My first impression of Truls Heggero was neither positive nor, fortunately, reliable. Moments after I popped in Truls & the Trees' debut album, Ailanthus, into my computer, I unfolded the CD insert and found the poster of the Norwegian singer/songwriter/mastermind dressed in full Boy Scout garb (or the Scandinavian equivalent), holding an acoustic guitar and looking pensively into the distance-- a visionary in arrested development. Initially I feared this would be just another indie-cute collective with overly twee hooks and lyrics that could have come from The Dangerous Book for Boys, but soon realized how off base I was. Heggero may be a prodigiously ambitious musician with a gift for witty, sprawling arrangements full of offbeat instrumentation and plenty of musical gambits (not unlike fellow Scout uniform wearer Sufjan Stevens), but his songs rarely announce themselves as particularly over the top or elaborate. He wants to deliver the goods directly to the listener-- the demonstrative hook, the headlong jam, the thrumming ambience, the unexpected coda-- and it only helps that his vocals range from androgynous and adenoidal (think Isaac Brock via Placebo's Brian Molko) to a stage-whisper falsetto suggestive of Sigur Rós's Jon Thor Birgisson.
Apparently, Heggero's brain runneth over, such that he needs not one, but two bands to get all his ideas out there. Releasing albums just months apart, the spacier Lukestar and the earthier Truls & the Trees show off slightly different aspects of his musical personality. Of the two, Lukestar's Lake Toba, the follow-up to 2004's Alpine Unit, has received more attention and is slated for a U.S. release this fall on Flameshovel. The title refers to the Sumatran volcanic lake that erupted eons ago and may have changed the course of human evolution. So much for modesty. Nevertheless, it's perhaps the more accessible, if not necessarily the more enjoyable, of the two albums, a solid collection of pulsing indie-rock songs with half-shouted hooks and guitars unwinding like fractal art. Opener "White Shade" and "The Shade You Hide" are Wrensy frenzies of manic guitars propelled by drummer Jørgen Smådal Larsen's tricky rhythms and imaginative fills. "The Clouds Tell" offers a floating-in-space interlude before the band blast off again on the zig-zagging "In a Hologram". Still, the album winds down as it proceeds: Lukestar can't maintain that creative intensity, letting the hooks soften and the arrangements lose some of their purposefulness.
Conceptually, Truls & the Trees works as a rustic flipside-project to Lukestar: Instead of a firm five-piece, it's a loosely defined collective ranging from six to sixteen members, depending on the time and place. To call the group an earthy counterpart doesn't mean the Trees are strictly acoustic or folksy, just less streamlined and more grounded. They even open their debut, Ailanthus (named for the fast-growing deciduous often referred to as the "tree of heaven"), with "Aim Vs. Signal", a full minute of squiggling synths. Similarly, these songs squirm away from expectations. Dag Stiberg's saxophone opens up the halting "Mystaxxx", making its dreamy atmospherics sound all the richer as drummer Larsen taps out Morse code rhythms on his snare rim, and "Count Your Steps" and the title track both race impatiently, doing somersaults as they run downhill. Stand-out "Upside Journey" sports an emphatic hook and a barreling momentum, then crashes into a Dexy's Midnight Runners breakdown on the coda. The one real joykill is closer "Topquark Journey to the Center of the Universe", which revisits "Upside Journey" but in a stiffly electronic style that ends the album on an uncharacteristically humdrum note. Still, while Lukestar's rock-band format necessarily limits their range, Truls & the Trees aren't quite a rock band or quite anything else, and with that unsettledness comes the freedom to do anything they want.
