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- Closing the circle: Tarja Turunen returns to "metal", Avishai Cohen recalls childhood
Closing the circle: Tarja Turunen returns to "metal", Avishai Cohen recalls childhood
In the first month of summer, the veterans of the Scandinavian heavy scene became more active — from the audience favorite Tarja Turunen to the still esoteric Evergrey. However, jazz fans and true avant-garde aesthetes were not left without gifts. For more information about the most interesting albums in June that you might have missed, see the traditional Izvestia review.
Tarja
Frisson Noir
When Tarja Turunen left Nightwish in the mid-2000s, it seemed that her future career would be an eternal balancing act between academic vocals and "metal", which she herself had once helped bring out of the underground. Over two decades of solo work, the Finnish singer has managed to test the strength of symphonic, Gothic, almost cinematic art-pop and even Christmas carols. But she was secretly drawn to the same heavy sound — not so much as a genre, but as a way to give an operatic voice physical weight.
Frisson Noir is billed as the heaviest album of Tarja's career, and this is a rare case where the marketing slogan is true. Here, guitars sound denser than ever before, and orchestral arrangements cease to be a decorative element and become part of a rhythmic machine. The epic "At Sea" unfolds as a mini-opera about a storm and loneliness, the duet with Marco Hietala "Leap of Faith" recalls the best days of symphonic metal of the early noughties, and the appearance of Dani Filth in "I Don't Care" adds the necessary dose of Gothic poison to the album. However, the main achievement of "Frisson Noir" is not in gravity and not in the star guests. This is a record on which Tarja stops proving her own versatility for the first time in a long time and just sounds like she's finally stopped looking for herself.
Avishai Cohen Trio
Eternal Child
Avishai Cohen is equally convincing both as a virtuoso double bass player and as a composer capable of turning complex rhythmic constructions into music of almost pop-song clarity. Since his collaboration with Chick Corea, the Israeli musician has consistently built his own universe, where Middle Eastern intonations, American jazz tradition and Mediterranean melancholy exist without visible seams. But Cohen's main quality is the ability to remain surprisingly accessible without simplifying himself.
Eternal Child is perhaps the most jazzy and at the same time the most understandable album by Cohen to an inexperienced listener. There are no attempts to expand the palette at the expense of ethnicity or spectacular genre hybrids. Instead, the musician returns to the trio format and discovers in it an inexhaustible source of movement. Young pianist Itai Simhovich and drummer Eviatar Slivnik play as if standards and post-bop have never been a museum exhibit, but continue to breathe in the present tense. Dedications to friends and family turn the record into a series of musical postcards: sunny "El Bazita", playful "Lookie", thoughtful title track by Chick Corea. But the final "Closure" is the strongest, which, contrary to the name, does not complete anything. She leaves the feeling of an open door—as if, in his fifties, Cohen really retained the ability to look at the world through the eyes of that "eternal child."
Simone Dinnerstein, Baroklyn
Hourglass
Simone Dinnerstein's career has never fit into the usual script of classical music stars. She became famous relatively late, having independently recorded Bach's "Goldberg Variations" and becoming one of the most unusual pianists of her generation. In her interpretations, there has always been more trust in the music than in the performer's ego. It is not surprising that her long-term creative union with Philip Glass turned out to be so organic.
It is all the more surprising that Hourglass is the first album entirely dedicated to Glass by Dinnerstein and her Baroklyn ensemble. The title of the record turns out to be an accurate metaphor: time here is not counted by the beats of a metronome, but flows like sand in an hourglass. The suite from the music to the movie "The Clock" reveals itself as a slow, almost painfully beautiful symphonic meditation, where the piano and strings do not so much conduct a dialogue as breathe the same air. The "Piano Concerto No. 1 (Tyrolean)" has an even stronger effect: the repetitive figures gradually lose their abstraction and acquire unexpected emotional density, and the central part sounds like an elegy for something that cannot be named. Dinnerstein reminds the listener once again that minimalism becomes truly profound only when the performers find within the repetition not a mathematical order, but a human (and not always perfect) logic.
Evergrey
Architects of a New Weave
The Swedes of Evergrey have never possessed the technical exhibitionism of Dream Theater and did not strive for the avant-garde experiments of Opeth. The main instrument of the band has always been melancholy — thick, almost tangible, transformed by Tom Englund into a full-fledged aesthetic system. Over three decades and 15 albums, Evergrey has learned to extract an almost anthemic power from depression, guilt, and internal crisis.
In his new job, Englund is not trying to reinvent the band, despite personnel changes and talks about starting a "new chapter." It's more like a concentrate of everything that Evergrey has been in recent years. The title track and "The World Is on Fire" move forward with unusual energy for the band, and the duet with Mikael Stanne in "A Burning Flame" brings back a sense of lively risk to their music. But Evergrey is most convincing when it allows the pace to slow down. "Leaving the Emptiness" and "Longing" transform the band's signature heaviness not into a set of riffs, but into a state of consciousness where each keyboard passage sounds like an attempt to hold on to a disintegrating inner world.
Fred Frith, Cornelius Claudio Kreusch, Johannes Tonio Kreusch
Pink / Neon
There are musicians who build their entire careers around their own handwriting, and there is Fred Frith, a man for whom music has long been a way to question the very idea of the genre. A former member of Henry Cow, one of the key architects of the European improvisational scene, he exists equally organically in free jazz, academic minimalism and noise art. In Pink / Neon, his partners are the Kroes brothers— a pianist and a guitarist.
There is almost no familiar jazz narrative here.: instead of themes and climaxes, there are fragments, flickers, gestures that appear and disappear before you have time to comprehend them. Cornelius Kroesch's piano crumbles into glassy harmonies, Johannes Kroesch's guitar acts as a source of barely discernible contours, and Frith turns his own instrument into a generator of events — creaks, noises, random resonances.
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