"Elevation", Susanna Wallumrød's 4th album : progressive in poetry

Susanna Wallumrød  is evidently a huge fan of French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867), who was described by Proust as the greatest poet of his century and whose musings on sex, death, morality and melancholy scandalized his time. He was also big on finding beauty among the darkness, and it seems to be that strain of his work that the Norwegian singer is tapping into. Elevation isn’t afraid to probe under some clammy rocks and delve into murky, gloomy areas; it’s on a mission to locate the light, which shines all the brighter for acknowledging its transience.

This is her second bonding session with the author of Les Fleurs Du Mai. Last year’s Baudelaire & Piano did what it said on the tin, presenting her singing his lines solo over her piano playing. Now, however, there’s a more concerted attempt to evoke his world through sound. Taped effects, rumbles and hisses, summon up the sinister between songs, sometimes giving the impression that My Bloody Valentine are — very gently, by their standards - soundchecking in the next room each time Susanna takes a breath. Her vocals (in English) and piano still take the lead roles, for the most part, but this is an album that aspires to the state of being a story, even a film, rather than a set of sad ballads.

'All is beauty’, she sings on the centrepiece and six-minute stand-out Invitation To The Voyage (one of Baudelaire’s most famous poems). The conclusion swoons for an escape to 'richness, serenity and pleasure’. That translation may bother some literature graduates but catches the general direction of travel of the poet’s reveries. Alchemy Of Suffering is as intense and hypnotic as Nico, and elsewhere, while timbres and tones in the voice bring to mind Joni Mitchell or Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh, the sheer focus of Susanna’s devotion to these interpretations ensures she sounds only like herself. 

Rose-Pale Dawn is a vocal-free experiment in buzzes, scratches and what might be a flickering radio dial - the soundscapes are by Stina Stjern, who collaborated on Susanna’s 2019 Hieronymus Bosch-inspired project Garden Of Earthly Delights — while Elevation itself floats in a similar ether to that inhabited by Kate Bush’s Aerial. Her emotional emissions come from a minimal orchestra nowadays, but are still in frequent dialogue with the magical.

As a conversation with Baudelaire it’s bookish and bespectacled, interested solely in his writings, and a different admirer might have productively engaged with his colourful, dandy-ish, doomed life story. Yet the - to bastardize his work - heavenly nectars and boundless space here are purifying.

Chris Roberts (PROG mag 3/2022)