There is a kind brightness that crosses “Whatever time Will Bring”: tenuous, never intrusive, like certain late summer afternoons. But it is not the nostalgia for the seasons passed to animate the third album of the Norwegian local stores: more than a revival passatism, the horizon of the disc seems to give voice to an inner harmony with the sound of an era: the seventies musical years, seen not as a repertoire to be mentioned, but as a landscape still habitable, alive, current. Maybe even necessary.
Around the voice and guitar of Bjørn Klakegg – sixty -seven -year -olds already mind of the neocaterrburians Needlepoint – a cohesive and versatile band moves, formed by Mattias Krohn Nielsen (guitars, keyboards), Magnus Tveten (bass, bass synth) and Tore Ljøkelsøy (battery, percussion), all of a generation of generation. subsequent. Their music moves with ease between family accents and more elusive references: in the songs the lush delicacy of the West Coast and the Mellow Gold Seventies, but also prog crafts, songwriting vein and a little indie taste as a home band.
Easy to get lost in the game of references, but it is only a first layer: “Daniel” and “Ready for a leap” intertwine acoustic arpeggios in a way that would not mind the most pastoral Genesis; And the echoes of Kevin Ayers are implicit but recurring, both in the waves of the melodies and in the only apparent placidity of the songs. “Love”, like other songs, can evoke Donovan 'frugality, but above all the stamp of Cat Stevens who repeatedly returns to the mind crossed the kind and colloquial voice of Klakegg.
On a more analytical level, there is a work of discreet but ingenious agreements: a writing that is not surprising with effects, but slips to the side, accompanying unexpected directions. “How you want me to be” plays on solar progressions all in greater, building a climate that deriently disorieves. “Core in a Peach” starts from a stubborn cradle and lets him puspegly from a trampled breeze, before opening up on a bridge Which draws an unexpected harmonic curve, as a thought that moves elsewhere.
Compositional freedom is wide and pervasive, but turns out to be in small shots. In “From Scratch” the deception is subtle: a perfect folk-pop that gives the illusion of a predictable comfortableness, and instead thinly transports to unexpected tortuosity.
Klakegg's remarkable guitar skills never steal the scene, but enrich it: imaginative melodic phrasing, memorable without ostentation, are supported by a timbre attention that leaves the mark – as in the final of “Dead Wood”, where the radiant solo finds the support of a drumming pressing that takes the forms of a groove Almost Madchester. Or even in the aforementioned “core in a peach”, which gives the guitar the space to hover in a carefree and melancholy momentum, consistent with the climate of the album.
It is not a record that tries to displace, but not one who is satisfied with playing well. The songs give the illusion of predictability, and instead they open, deviate, they find personal roads. It is a rare balance: that between immediacy and complexity, between profession and inspiration.
The title, “Whatever time Will Bring”, is not a declaration of intent but a reflection: of a quiet attitude, but not compliant. As if Klakegg's writing had long stopped wanting to force things, preferring to observe them scrolling – and distil, without haste, something that remains.
28/04/2025
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
