Kari Rueslåtten
To the North
Despotz Records
2015
It’s hard not to like Kari Rueslåtten. She’s got one of the most stirring female voices you’ve ever heard and while she started out from some doom/experimental metal band, she managed to graduate to a style that is quite her own, mixing folk with pop and electronic elements, in such an original and unique way that I have a hard time thinking of anyone else that does what she does and manages to pull it off in such a heart-achingly beautiful way.
Kari keeps instrumentation to a bare minimum with loops, minimal percussion and various forms of piano… her story telling ability is second to none, managing to bring to life “other people’s” stories through a prism that sometimes is as of late, increasingly melancholic, but can also encompass a lot of different emotions – sometimes actually quite contrasting ones…
“Battle Forevermore” is the single and opener for the album and it’s a bittersweet and poignant song about breaking up instead of keep fighting a lost battle, when it comes to human relationships.
“Mary’s Song” is a pretty sad song about a mother abandoning her child. It seems that ever since motherhood – Kari seems to have at least a song per album about the special relationship between mothers and their children, but it’s always in quite different ways… sometimes sweet and loving and sometimes sad and bitter. She actually sings much of this in quite a deep voice that she seems to need to try a little harder to muster, but fits the song quite brilliantly.
“What We Have Lost” has this amazing mingling of pop and folk melodies that Kari perfected in “Mesmerized”… and revisited on occasion thereafter. Utterly brilliant and I have to say I really love the crossover way in which Kari sings a song that is not “classical” but manages to deliver the finishes of each line in a very transcendent style that is truly quite captivating…
“Three Roses in My Hands” is one of those slightly awkward numbers that Kari can conjure up from thin air, a more folk oriented number about a woman who is drawn to the graves of one that could have been her lover?! Yeah, not your typical love ballad… and the way she sings it… pure bliss…
“Dance with the King” portrays the majesty of love and delivers another pretty awesome chorus. Overall it might sound pretty hurt and pretty fragile as most songs tend to in “To the North” project a bittersweet melancholy… we’re all kings and queens, but without crowns in this game…
“Letting Go” is an even bleaker and somewhat electro driven song with folk flourishes and an even weirder premise lyrically, either about breaking up or having someone “die”…
“Arrow in My Heart” is a measured sad ballad about breaking up after a fight and deciding to not return, but feeling extreme sorrow and hurt, even though elation also comes rushing through…
Kari makes “Turn, Turn, Turn” completely her own, a song originally recorded by The Limeliters but really popularized when The Byrds covered it, a bit later in the mid-60s. It has been since covered countless times, but this version is really one of the better ones of those I have heard. Funnily enough most of the lyrics are lifted almost word for word, from the Book of Ecclesiastes, attributed to King Solomon, giving him a “songwriting credit” for a chart topper, almost a thousand plus years later!
Last but not least, “To the North” the album’s namesake is a soft song where Kari mostly vocalizes and delivers a sole verse, embracing the very fact of cultural and geographical heritage in a song that sounds almost like a moment of epiphany, a sound so sacrosanct and enveloping it almost touches upon divinity.
One of the “sirens”, but one that will not bite your head off and gnaw on your bones, if you decide to listen to her song, I believe, Kari should be considered along with a few other musicians a universal treasure when it comes to the art-form of vocal music… listening to any of her albums always and without fail, seems able to take me up to a higher plain… for such is the magic of music that it can touch your psyche without actually making physical contact with your person...
Kari keeps instrumentation to a bare minimum with loops, minimal percussion and various forms of piano… her story telling ability is second to none, managing to bring to life “other people’s” stories through a prism that sometimes is as of late, increasingly melancholic, but can also encompass a lot of different emotions – sometimes actually quite contrasting ones…
“Battle Forevermore” is the single and opener for the album and it’s a bittersweet and poignant song about breaking up instead of keep fighting a lost battle, when it comes to human relationships.
“Mary’s Song” is a pretty sad song about a mother abandoning her child. It seems that ever since motherhood – Kari seems to have at least a song per album about the special relationship between mothers and their children, but it’s always in quite different ways… sometimes sweet and loving and sometimes sad and bitter. She actually sings much of this in quite a deep voice that she seems to need to try a little harder to muster, but fits the song quite brilliantly.
“What We Have Lost” has this amazing mingling of pop and folk melodies that Kari perfected in “Mesmerized”… and revisited on occasion thereafter. Utterly brilliant and I have to say I really love the crossover way in which Kari sings a song that is not “classical” but manages to deliver the finishes of each line in a very transcendent style that is truly quite captivating…
“Three Roses in My Hands” is one of those slightly awkward numbers that Kari can conjure up from thin air, a more folk oriented number about a woman who is drawn to the graves of one that could have been her lover?! Yeah, not your typical love ballad… and the way she sings it… pure bliss…
“Dance with the King” portrays the majesty of love and delivers another pretty awesome chorus. Overall it might sound pretty hurt and pretty fragile as most songs tend to in “To the North” project a bittersweet melancholy… we’re all kings and queens, but without crowns in this game…
“Letting Go” is an even bleaker and somewhat electro driven song with folk flourishes and an even weirder premise lyrically, either about breaking up or having someone “die”…
“Arrow in My Heart” is a measured sad ballad about breaking up after a fight and deciding to not return, but feeling extreme sorrow and hurt, even though elation also comes rushing through…
Kari makes “Turn, Turn, Turn” completely her own, a song originally recorded by The Limeliters but really popularized when The Byrds covered it, a bit later in the mid-60s. It has been since covered countless times, but this version is really one of the better ones of those I have heard. Funnily enough most of the lyrics are lifted almost word for word, from the Book of Ecclesiastes, attributed to King Solomon, giving him a “songwriting credit” for a chart topper, almost a thousand plus years later!
Last but not least, “To the North” the album’s namesake is a soft song where Kari mostly vocalizes and delivers a sole verse, embracing the very fact of cultural and geographical heritage in a song that sounds almost like a moment of epiphany, a sound so sacrosanct and enveloping it almost touches upon divinity.
One of the “sirens”, but one that will not bite your head off and gnaw on your bones, if you decide to listen to her song, I believe, Kari should be considered along with a few other musicians a universal treasure when it comes to the art-form of vocal music… listening to any of her albums always and without fail, seems able to take me up to a higher plain… for such is the magic of music that it can touch your psyche without actually making physical contact with your person...