Originally Posted by James I liked that thread.

Sidsel Endresen & Bugge Wesseltoft
Out Here, In There
2002

genre: vocal jazz, new jazz
1. Truth - 5:26
2. Out Here, In There - 5:47
3. Survival Techniques 1+2 - 5:04
4. Survival Techniques 3 - 2:14
5. Names Numbers - 5:30
6. Hav - 3:31
7. Birds - 3:56
8. Voices - 2:39
9. Heartbeat - 4:25
10. I Do - 3:59
11. Try - 4:00

As cool and hipster-ish I'd seem by saying 'yeah, I've known these two, like, all my life', I can tell you now that that just ain't gonna happen. This'd be more because of the fact that it's only been about a month since I've even known that Bugge can be a Christian name. That's kinda how this journal's going to work over time - some of these albums (like the Dylan one above) will be old favourites, others will be ones I've only gotten hold of fairly recently. As such, I probably won't end up going on so long about this album as others, but I'll do my best Plus, there's a lot about these two that remains a mystery to me, so the whole background info portion of this particular review won't be all that juicy and/or meaty. What I know and you definitely need to know if you're cool enough to be reading this is that vocalist Sidsel Endresen and keyboardist/pianist Bugge Wesseltoft are both Norweigan, and as such hail from what I've been discovering to be a very rich and pulsating Scandinavian new-jazz scene. I imagine that there'll be more from this scene coming this thread's way in future, as it's an uber-awesome area of music that I've only just been starting to explore.

This is all very thin-end-of-the-wedge stuff then, which is all very exciting for me as far as additions to the old musical library go but, enough about me - I suppose I'd better tell you what this is all about eh. Sung in English by Endresen, this is nevertheless a completely new kind of music to the me who first signed up to MB almost 2 years ago, that me being, of course, a me whose only dabblings in jazz amounted to (if my memory's all that great) Herbie Hancock's River, John Coltrane's Blue Train and a few words in my ear about how I should really think about getting hold of Kind Of Blue. I think I actually first found out about this pair via LastFM's 'similar artists' links - I forget who I was looking up on it exactly.

Anyway, on to the album itself...one which, for me, goes to show that every now and then, if you take music a bit more seriously than others, you really can do a lot worse than have a look around outside of your comfort zone every now and then. It's a bleak, minimalist affair on the whole - a bare-bones approach to composition and studio production that shows off the spine of the album's entire sound for all to see, this being the frankly brilliant vocals from Endresen and the subtle touches of Wesseltoft behind his keyboard. The whole thing in a nutshell is there for all to see in the soft, almost whispery opener Truth - the light touches from Wesseltoft on the electric piano and Endresen's soaring, sweet vocal fitting together in the sonic picture wonderfully, as both musicians kinda play off one another to create a fairly remarkable whole.

That said 'remarkable whole' being a very evocative, cold and wintry vibe, and one that brings to mind sitting around in the middle of a misty snowstorm, endlessly sipping cups of tea to warm up next to one of those little plug-in heaters from the supermarket you can never seem to find enough of when you actually need them. So, yeah...pretty warming, relaxing stuff in other words, at least in the main. If it's a comparison you're after, I guess you could say Endresen's vocal style puts her somewhere between a jazzier Joni Mitchell and a (much) more low-key Lisa Gerrard (in fact, Voices is basically Lisa Gerrard by numbers). Particularly on the less smooth, more left-of-centre and sinister moments like Heartbeat her silky vocal style and its capacity to do something unexpected is there for all to see.

To sum the album up in a sentence, it's a cold, bleak sonic picture which either mucks about with your head or eases you along on the ride. To sum that up in two songs, listen to both the Survival Techniques songs back-to-back and you've more or less got the picture. Definitely something I'd recommend, but it's certainly not for everyone, and it's not exactly for all moods and times either (but, then again, how many albums are anything like that anyway). It's a beautiful, graceful little album that veers from a soothing, reined-in jazz style to a more avante-garde, sometimes even slightly disturbing one. It's a grower, that's for sure.