Artist: Nordagust
Title: In The Mist of Morning
Type: Album
Label: Karisma Records

Whilst hardly new, having a 2010 release, itself a reworking of a 2007 demo, Nordagust’s ‘In The Mist Of Morning’ arrived for review care of Metalteam towers. Hailing from Norway, with cover art of dark shadows, it could easily have been another slice of the black metal that crawls from the pits of hell via that nation. Instead, it’s an epic collection of unashamed prog. As a regular listener to Yes, owner of all Genesis CDs (Steve Hackett era folks, I’ve got some taste!), and regular denizen of Jethro Tull concerts over the decades, naturally, the review fell to me. So, I popped in the disc, turned up the volume, and relaxed, ready to be taken on a trip through space care of a genre that has produced so many of the most technically gifted musicians of the modern era.

Then a funny thing happened; I suddenly noticed my headphones were quiet, and there was no sound. Had the player died on me? Nope, according to the little display, I’d listened to the whole album and an hour of my life had gone past. Oh well, I must be working too hard and fallen asleep. One boil of the kettle and a refreshing mug of tea later, and I settled in to listen again, and again it happened. Time seemed to jump an hour, the music seemed to have played, but I couldn’t remember it. Had I fallen asleep again? Nope, if I had, dropping a pint of tea in my lap, it’s a big mug folks, would surely have woken me up, or at least left me damp, but the brew was drunk, and the album was played. Determined to work out what was going on, I again hit the play, and through an effort of will managed to listen to the whole album without phasing out. It’s then I realised the problem wasn’t that I was going unconscious, or being abducted by aliens and having my memory wiped after an anal probe, it was just the music was so utterly somnambulant and plodding it had played without leaving any impact or impression! Don’t get me wrong, I like my prog. Hey, I’ve paid top dollar to see Pink Floyd live; I’ve got Roger Waters tour shirts in my cupboard and count ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ as one of my top 5 albums of all time, but I just couldn’t get Nordagust. Yes, prog can and for that matter should be overblown, and sometimes its charm can lie in its complexity and even pretensions, but ‘In The Mist Of Morning’ was just dull. Track after track plodded by at the same dragging pace, each merging into the next, whilst the vocalist had a single, slow, pained, almost weeping delivery for every song, when he wasn’t abandoned entirely for ambient birdsong and running water sounds.

Here and there I could hear snatches of influence of the classics, ‘Elegy’ having a musical progression that sounds sampled from the aforementioned ‘Lamb.’ Sadly, the bit that sounded sampled was from one of the slow instrumental lines that peppered that album to allow Peter Gabriel to do his costume changes in the stage show. What this album would have needed to grab me was the occasional change of pace. The musicianship on show is of master class level, with each of the dozens of instruments, medieval strings and wood wind mixing in with the electric guitars and keyboards. The trouble was the skill was not matched by the writing or production. Classics of prog have differing tempos, changes of pace, changes of beat, the variations keeping the listener on board and hypnotised. ‘In The Mist of Morning’ has one beat, one pace, and doesn’t so much hypnotise as anaesthetise! The impression this album left, when it finally managed to make one, was not of a great album, but of the sort of background music playing in a new age supplies shop. This is not the sort of album that I’ll be giving a regular play, unless, of course, my insomnia plays up, in which case…………

http://www.nordagust.com

www.myspace.com/nordagust

Spenny Bullen

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