Susanne Sundfør
Music for People in Trouble

THE REVIEW

On her Facebook page, Susanne Sundfor had published about a year ago a sketch with various drawings for new ideas to define the base of the new record. "Music for People in Trouble" is a decisively different work from the previous "Ten Love Songs": away with synth-pop, away with orchestral pieces, away with catchy songs, and especially away with the drums that had literally driven Susanne mad in defining a sound that was right for the ten love songs. Ten new songs resulting from a difficult period of exhaustion, songs that were born during various trips documented in the booklet with black-and-white photos taken mostly in cold and impersonal hotel rooms with soul-less beds. Lamps with their lights off barely define the printed images, leaving an atmosphere suspended between dream and reality, a sort of almost Lynchian dimension of the recent finale of Twin Peaks. The music is simplified, dominated by the grand piano and acoustic guitar which in the previous works was a very marginal instrument if not completely absent. There is no room for synths, despite Sundfor's well-known passion for this instrument, just atmospheric notes to connect delicate vocal weaves and wind instruments like flutes and clarinets, sometimes leaving room for small jazzy interludes. An album very twilight, painful towards the suffering planet torn by conflicts and climatic upheavals, an album dedicated to all people in a problematic phase of their lives and who need to slow down the pace of their being.