Come Smel The Band
“I think we’re a little bit like Rush, in their musicality and treating each other with respect.”
Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen
If you’re a fan of boundary-pushing, genre-shredding music (and as a reader of Prog, that goes without saying), then you can’t have failed to notice the astonishing stream of bands that Norway has produced over the past 10 years, many of them released by the Rune Grammofon label. Initially spearheaded by norsk rock stalwarts Motorpsycho, and quickly followed by the likes of Bushman’s Revenge, Elephant9, Fire! and Krokofant, a loosely affiliated scene has developed that mixes jazz, prog, metal and psychedelia to create a new type of challenging but accessible avant-rock.
Yet as the promo blurb for their latest album says, it could very well be Hedvig Mollestad Trio is their fifth album in eight years, and quite possibly their best yet. Consisting of Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen on guitar, Ellen Brekken on bass and Ivar Loe Bjørnstad on drums, the music they make is a deliriously exciting mash-up of 70s-style hard rock and jazz, monolithic riffing combined with lithe instrumental interplay. Imagine Black Sabbath jamming with Mahavishnu Orchestra while Robert Fripp looks on approvingly. If you haven’t investigated them before, now is a very good time to do so.
