Ding Dong. You’re Dead. (studio album) by Hedvig Mollestad Trio

From Mercury 03/23/2021 15:39

(Thick, swaggering Heavy Psych Meets King Crimson-ish Prog meets some jazz fusion. It's good, although it didn't quite capture my imagination or awe me.)

The music here is cool. It has swagger. It has a certain cool jamming vitality. The songs generally are dominated by Hedvig's guitar tones which are thick and gnarly. All good stuff.

The prog elements harken back a bit to some of the sounds you may hear on early King Crimson. All knotty and gnarled and somewhat dirty. The Jazz Fusion is there in the improvisational bits and the rhythmic switch ups and so forth. The Jazz Fusion elements fell the most flat or at least the closest to flat of the sounds I heard. They weren't bad but just not awe-inspriring or rich. The Heavy psych elements screeched and screamed and created a hazy atmosphere of overloaded solos and crunchy, heavy riffage. The whole soup of sound here has some really cool moments and aspects, but I didn't feel they were all integrated into a cohesive or memorable album.

Overall, while I maybe wasn't awed by this album in particular, it did make me quite intrigued by the other albums and music by this trio and the solo album released b y Hedvig last year (2020). There are the individual pieces here to make some stellar stuff, but as of now, to these ears, this ain't quite it.