TULLE is an Oslo-based, 24 year old artist and songwriter, who uses the term ‘Death-Pop’ to describe her music. I think that must be a joke (and ‘joke’ is how her name translates from Norwegian to English) because although ‘Can’t be saved’ is melancholic and gothic I’d hardly describe it as morbid. Even so, that is her preferred stylisation, focusing on ‘the big questions’ we’d all prefer to put off until another day, assuming there is one, such as what happens after death, and what do we become after grief? Actually, the deeper you delve into her back story, the greater the inherent morbidity ..read more

Slowing things right down tonight with a piece of very artistic work from Mattias Lies. I’ve had to swot up quite a lot to write this piece, it’s as far away as you can get from pop 4/4 standard, so bear with me. Let’s start at the very beginning was a useful piece of advice from Mary Poppins.  Mattias Lies is a well known Swedish musician who has just released his seventh album, ‘Rösten från det Karelska näset (‘The voice from the Karelian isthmus’). The project he has been working on is so typically Swedish, by which I mean I’ve come across similar examples before, as he set about inter ..read more

I finally caught up with Embla and the Karidotters by chance by way of an email stuck in the wrong part of gmail and which I almost zapped. Glad I didn’t. The band is named for Embla Karidotter and includes members from groups such as Razika (her band), Aiming for Enrike, Honningbarna, the Needs, and Sløtface, although I can’t decipher who is who just yet. She fashioned the band out of her passion for country music, a direction Beyoncé just chose so who’s going to challenge that? They won the country Spellemann (Norwegian Grammys) music award in 2022 with the debut ‘Hello I’m Embla’ and have p ..read more

“…one highly pleasing piece of melodic rock” When Hollow Ship were here in November of last year there’s was a convoluted story actually about a ‘Hollow boat’ (‘Utsuro-bune’) in Japanese folklore; one which appeared off a village in the early 19th century in Japan but the sole female occupant couldn’t explain in Japanese to the local fisherman who she was or why she was there. So they simply pushed her out to sea again. As you do. I expected it to be psychy and proggy, the sort of thing which goes hand in hand with a mysterious tale, and in the event it turned out to be more of the latter. The ..read more

Posted in April 2024 as a ‘Weekend Intermission’ feature Weekend Intermission is our regular feature where we look at an artist or band or breaking news not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit. Written by David Bentley, this post below was first published in September 2020, as the pandemic was hitting hard, in the e-zine Backseat Mafia and is republished here in support of the Nordic Music Central article ‘Weekend Intermission – What Benefits will having the UK’s Two Biggest Arenas Bring To Manchester?’ (published 20th April 2024). (See https://www.nordicmusiccentral.com/wee ..read more

Weekend Intermission is our regular feature where we look at an artist or band or breaking news not from the Nordic countries, just to mix things up a bit. On 23rd April the £365 million Co-op Arena, known as Co-op Live, situated right next door to Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, about two miles (3.2 km) from Manchester city centre, opens to the public, in an area that 25 years ago was a post industrial wasteland. It will be the biggest musical arena in the UK (and specifically ‘designed’ for music according to the publicity), taking that claim to fame away from the AO Arena in the city cent ..read more

The latest addition to the excellent Finnish Soliti label comes in the form of Julian Lähdesmäki, who is originally from Helsinki, was brought up in Los Angeles and transited between the two in his youth, then settled in Nashville and a host of other US cities, soaking up the musicianship in each, and has now returned to his roots. He sounds like music’s answer to Bill Bryson. I imagine he might have met him on his travels. He says he came back “to connect with my homeland and continue the sonic journey”, adding “I am such a combination of the places I have lived, but ultimately I want to real ..read more

The press release I received concerning Pom Poko’s latest single, ‘Champion’ which is released on 18th April, just a day before a short UK tour which is their first for a couple of years, is so succinct that I seriously considered simply dumping it here, verbatim. But I couldn’t possibly do that, especially with a band like Pom Poko. ‘Champion’ is an appropriate title for a song from a band that came out of nowhere in 2017 to seize Norway by storm with their unique all-action take on math rock. Subsequently they released their debut album, ‘Birthday’ in the same year (2019) that they appeared ..read more

If you’ve submitted a single, EP or album to NMC recently and haven’t seen a review I’m afraid that we are overwhelmed with them at the moment. We are getting around 25-30 submissions a week, not to mention the stuff on submission platforms like Musosoup, which we also use. So with the best will in the world we can’t review everything. I suspect this is happening because the number of review sites is diminishing, especially here in the UK. But please don’t stop sending them in, things can change and we can consider alternatives like multiple short two-paragraph reviews through the ‘Songs for t ..read more

Anmar has visited us twice before and always offers well constructed thoughtful pieces of music, out of which you can gain great satisfaction without understanding a word she’s singing. The idea behind ‘Vindueskigger’ which translates as window gazer, is that it takes you on a sonic journey through a night in the city centre, “where both solitude and presence are reflected in the same window.” I reckon many British readers would immediately associate window gazing to mean window shopping, at which we are World Champions but I see immediately what she’s getting at. Perhaps it’s my narcissism bu ..read more