Tim: “If you like music that expresses diaphanous wonder and breathy rapture, then you’ll love Norwegian duo Alfred Hall,” says the e-mail, which brings the first time my vocabulary’s been outdone by ludicrously verbose PR guff, and to be honest I’m surprised it’s taken five and a half years.
Tom: Diaphanous wonder? That probably just means the music’s so light and meaningless that we’ll see right through it.
Tim: Well let’s see…
Tim: ..that’s bloody great, so I looked it up and apparently diaphanous means “light, delicate and translucent”; it’s normally used to describe fabric, and I have genuinely no idea what it means when describing wonder. Nor, now I come to think think about it, how “breathy” could define rapture. BUT ANYWAY we’re not here to criticise promoters, as easy as that might be. Let’s do the music, because I love it. The melodies, the vocals (which can be described as breathy), the xylophone bit. Even the whistling – much as I typically loathe anything that could be described as jaunty, that sounds really good and chirpy.
Tom: I was all set to disagree with you, to write a piece about how this was pretty mediocre, and then the final chorus kicked in. It took a while to get there, but yes: this has some good in it. Replace that whistling with the much better instrumentation from the final chorus, and I think I could get behind this.
Tim: Alfred Hall have been going a few years now in Norway, with an album or two under their belt, but this is their first attempt to crack the international market; I do hope they succeed, if all their stuff is this good.