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Gazpacho is a ridiculous name – yet the Norwegian band’s music is anything but. Since the late 90s they’ve cultivated progressive vignettes with the imagery and transportive powers of twisted fairy tales, even as they face profoundly human questions.
It’s fiercely intelligent music, delivered with the light touch of first-rate songwriters, which they are. By day, singer Jan-Henrik Ohme works for Sony Music Norway, while keyboard player Thomas Andersen composes written jingles for major ad campaigns and releases solo piano records.
Perhaps it’s a response that they’ve become masters of introspective, conceptual albums, devoid of concessions to anything so limiting as commercial potential. Molok (2015) was a head-spinning meditation on conflicts between the emotional and rational mind, via Norwegian folklore with a side of quantum physics. On 2018’s Soyuz they contemplated the passing of time with detours into Russian space history and Tibetan funeral practices.
Five years on from their last release the band are ready to do something different. Something shorter, sharper, noisier. The end result – their 12th alum – isn’t perhaps as different as this premise implies. But there’s a bite and a focus to Magic 8-Ball that’s sometimes been missing from their previous dense, cerebral depths.
In the aftermath of 2020’s Fireworker, they started work on a record about a comet hitting Earth, and humanity’s nonchalant response to impending doom. But when Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2021 satire Don’t Look Up beat them to it with the same premise, they decided to scrap what they had and start over.
The one piece they did keep was pivotal – a moody, distorted rocker that moves through violins, searing guitars and the sound of lapping waves, Sky King was inspired by the true story of an Alaska Airlines baggage handler who stole an empty plane and flew it into a remote island, killing himself.
It set them on a new path that resulted in this poetic, commanding ode to the randomness of human life. As a theme, it suits them well: Magic 8-Ball is full of the icy atmosphere and layers of intrigue that Gazpacho have become known for; only now it’s stirred into sharper packages. Its eight tracks house short stories about characters who find themselves at breaking point in extraordinary situations.
Opener Starling is a satisfyingly meaty nine minutes. All modern classical elegance and heartbreak laced with mournful strings, baroque choral textures and haunting keys, it builds to heavy, distorted guitars and crashing beats. Think Steven Wilson’s The Raven That Refused To Sing, but with a stranger, more experimental heart.
They shift quickly for We Are Strangers, its menacing, electronic start giving way to big synths and an anthemic, singalong chorus. It’s practically a straight ‘rocker’ by Gazpacho’s standards, though, as with the rest of the record, whimsical turns are never far off. There are dark corners and light spaces. Orchestral elements. Clever, off-kilter drum lines. Idiosyncrasies that flow naturally and melodies that hit hard, seamlessly twisting in unexpected ways – but always landing somewhere that feels completely natural.
At the punchier end, Ceres offers three minutes of impish modern classicism in the vein of Iamthemorning, its sparse opening notes embellished by Jon-Arne Vilbo’s brooding guitars and Ohme’s beguiling tenor.
8-Ball is a jaunty curveball – funny in a twisted funfair-after-dark kind of way, all old European theatre and allusions to a life gone wrong. ‘The bottle that you drank from and the corpse of Father Time,’ Ohme sings, like Cabaret’s Joel Grey via a dark Scandinavian forest.
But it’s the longer tracks, rich yet incisive affairs, that really stay with us. Immerwahr (German for ‘always true’) spins delicate arrangements, strident rock flourishes and strains of woodwind around a stirring pop core.
Gingerbread Men takes the listener on a journey through shadows, part macabre fairy tale (‘Rain beats down on the candy streets/Each drop sings the gingerman to sleep’), part prog rock epic. It moves from the sound of rain (that closeness to nature, quietly present in all Gazpacho records) through strings, guitars, drums and synths that gradually stride into the picture. All of it, always, fused around melodies that stay under the skin.
Unrisen closes on a note of wonder and darkness. Old-world flavours and harmonies alongside electronic components. High, fragile tension offset by warmth and bursts of heaviness that fade into a suspenseful close – a haunted question mark, left by these existential tales of chance and the strange, resolute power of time.
Magic 8-Ball is on sale now via Kscope.
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