There are several artists that we have followed closely in NMC, sometimes over years as they have released singles, which finally found their way, sometimes via one or more EPs, onto an album.
One of them is the incomparable Terje Gravdal, who has just released that album, ‘Songs of Witness’ and from which we take this track, which has already been released as a single, ‘Under the Snow’.
I do believe we have listened to just about every other song on the album at one time or another, but the creative Terje, whom we have often compared to Bob Dylan, just keeps pulling you back in.
I say that because very little of what he writes does not concern the world as he sees it. And its warts. That doesn’t make him unique but it does mean he has a take on it that demands to be heard.
A man of and for our times as I mentioned last time out.
I don’t think he wrote the 10 tracks with the intention of them coming together as a concept album but as he says, it eventually occurred to him that they had become “a body of work”, which to my mind is much the same thing.
Concept albums were all the rage during the height of the prog rock era and some of them originated in the same way – individual pieces of which it was perceived they had a common thread that could generate a ‘story’. ELP’s ‘Tarkus’ for example, Yes’ ‘Tales from Topographic Oceans’, and Genesis’ ‘The Lamb lies down on Broadway and ‘Supper’s Ready’.
And more recently, Nightwish’s ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’.
Terje is already in very good company.
There was a common theme to some of them. ‘Supper’s Ready’ for example was a spiritual journey of two lovers through a cosmic battle which was a metaphor for the endless fight between good and evil, while ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ tells the story of the history of life and evolution on Earth and the potential for us to destroy it.
And that’s where the common theme really comes in as Terje relates that it only occurred to him as he wrote ‘Under the Snow’, which was the last to be written but which is the first track, that it completes an ‘arc’ starting with the people who helped build the society we inherited, and ending with questions about how power, information and that inheritance are being managed today.
Included in that latter category I might add are various get-rich-quick insider trading Norwegian politicians, Donald Trump, mass migration, the war in Ukraine, the New World Order and the Great Reset, the loss of individual freedoms, one sided communication and workaholism.
At the same time, on a more human level he has broached subjects like working-class pride, the benefits of living in the wilderness, hunting reindeer, the human resilience of his forebears in the face of adversity, paeans to his wife and family while even penning a touching tribute to a cousin and a friend who tragically died in a mountaineering accident.
Has anyone else ever broached so many and varied topics? The only thing missing is a break-up song. (Only joking!)
And that is where the album title comes in as Terje comes down from the mountain and bears witness to society’s benefits and ills. But he offers only observations, not answers.
As for ‘Under the Snow’, it puts down a marker for much of the rest of the album, hinting strongly that is where you will find buried all the things you aren’t supposed to know about, the perfection of its glistening white fall hiding the murky secrets of society, especially the political and big business ones that are scrutinised in other songs.
The acoustic guitar and cello-driven music, verging on cinematic score in its intensity, and delivered vocally by an almost Johnny Cash-like reverence, brought to mind the black comedy movie Fargo, in which snow acts almost like a main character, shaping the visual style, the plot, and the moral landscape with its wide overhead shots of blank, white landscapes to show the extreme isolation and emptiness of the American Midwest (read northern Norway here). While snow often symbolises pure innocence, the snowy expanse of the movie is violently stained and drenched with human greed and bloodshed.
If they ever write a sequel they know where to look for the music.
Terje’s wordplay, as ever is tremendous, embracing,
“Red Light Island, lowered eyes/careful hands and careful lies”
(I wonder whom that might reference, and if I’m right, might ‘careless hands’ be more accurate?
“Own ambitions, dressed as care”
“No confessions, No wicked leaks, no Noble words of peace”
“Nothing false and nothing true/files that rest and files they swept/Notes they guard and secrets kept”
All chronicled from his vantage point, “Seen from the north, in fading light”.
You could spend all night down at the pub analysing the meaning behind these lines.
And you will conclude that Terje Gravdal probably kept the best song (of many) until last.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/terjegravdalmusic
