Trollheart

I have to be honest: Mondo scares me. Not as a person (that I'm aware of anyway) but as a musician. He scares me in a sort of pseudo-Frownland way, in that I look at the running times on his albums and they're almost always massive. Here, I see songs that run for fifteen minutes, nineteen minutes... I mean, I'm sure/I hope the music is good and something I can relate to and review and also hopefully enjoy, but nearly twenty minutes a track is stretching it, even for a prog head like me who is used to such things. Like I said in my recent review in my prog journal, a long epic song is almost the staple of prog, but it all depends on how it's executed. It can be a triumph, where the song goes by so quickly you don't realise it and are still left wanting more at the end, or it can be an excruciating ordeal that you wish would just for the love of Satan and and his little wizards come to a close and release you from its horrible clutches.

I know once people get composing it's often hard to restrict the time of a track, I do know and sympathise with this. But sometimes shorter is better, and certainly easier to review. That said, perhaps I'll be like I was after hearing “Supper's ready” or “Grendel” or “A plague of lighthouse keepers” for the first time, and wish there was more. But I fear that one way or the other, this may be something of a struggle. However, moaning about it won't make the record any shorter, so let's dive in and see what we have to work with.

Rejsekammerat – Trouble Salad (Mondo Bungle)

I should also apologise to Mondo, as I originally agreed to review this, well, let's just say some time ago, but my absence from the forum has meant he has had to wait longer than he should have. As have those of you who had submissions in during and before 2015, so my apologies to you all. I'll try to get through these as fast as I can, without rushing anyone's album, if that makes sense. I have no idea what the title means, but suspect it's German or Danish or Norwegian, probably linked in with Vikings in some way. Possibly.

Okay, we open on “Cryoseism”, and already I'm impressed. This is like a church organ sound with wind effects and then some sort of almost otherworldly synth line wafting along it like a gust of gentle air. Mind you, the two synths are slightly out of tune with each other – which I'm sure is intentional – giving a vaguely discordant and even threatening sound to the music. That much aside though, it is really nice. More or less continuing in this basic vein until about three minutes in, when some new elements make their way into the melody, and the two discordant synths kind of come together; it's not quite as jarring now, almost like two harmonics which have reached the same pitch (do I know what I'm talking about? Sounds like I do, but I'm not sure) and suddenly merge into one sound. Now the second synth has disappeared to be replaced shortly afterwards by a darker one, the melody altering a little now and taking us into the fifth of the seven minutes this runs for. It's overall both relaxing and a little disquieting, which is a rare feat for a musician to accomplish.

Very interestingly, the next track is a cover. Indeed, it's a track that appears on one of the many demos of Swiss Ambient/Black Metal band Paysage d'Hiver's Kristall & Isa, released in 2000. However, whereas the original track is about six minutes long Mondo's version runs to over ten, so has he overstretched it? Well, it's basically one long drone sequence. Now, I've never really been able to get into drone but I've heard some good things and I did enjoy Paysage d'Hiver's self-titled album when I reviewed it in Metal Month III, and this is certainly atmospheric. I'm sure musicians would be better able to appreciate all the nuances and sounds and instruments and loops used in this piece; I can't tell you what tools Mondo is using, and essentially it kind of all sounds much the same to me all the way through, but it's a good same, if you understand me. Something like this probably has to be stretched and dragged out for it to achieve the proper effect; a few minutes wouldn't allow the tone or the mood to develop sufficiently. Maybe. I'm sure there are a lot of – what do you guys call them? Textures? Yeah, textures in here, but to me it's just one long drone, but a very powerful and effective one. Certainly gives a cold, lonely feeling of isolation and possibly approaching but unknown danger out of the mists. Cool. Not entirely sure why it needed to be longer than the original, though.

“Mountain village” is a really spooky, eerie little piece with a repeating pattern that gets right under your skin and the kind of dark synth that seems like it's coming to slit your throat. It's also by far the shortest track, at less than three minutes. An equally spooky piano and organ (?) carry us into “Should you need a travelling companion”, with those wind sounds from the opener back in evidence, and there's really a very nice melody about it. It's almost like a musical box. Kind of. Could hear this playing in one of those Chucky movies or something, you know the kind of thing, Baby Button Eyes or whatever, about cursed dolls or kids or both, kind of thing that would play in the nursery as their eyes turned red. Or green maybe. I like this one a lot I have to say.

The last of the short-ish tracks, “Snowhead Temple” has dark ambient weather effects, not quite thunder but rumbling and wind (shut up) and then a kind of whistling sound with what might be birds cawing in the distance? Not too sure; as with all ambient music, I'm never quite certain if I'm hearing sounds on the album or outside my window, though it is night here so probably no birds outside. No actual music here, per se, though there's a certain rhythm even without any percussion; kind of like listening to the weather making music. But here's where things begin to get either interesting or annoying, as we hit the nineteen-minuter on this album, with another fifteen-minute track before it closes.

“Watcher on the summit” starts with a screechy sort of effect and some dark synth I guess, feedback presumably, conjuring up, for me anyway, the idea of something waiting in the dark to take you. There's a great sense of space and expanse in the music, almost like someone is taking it and physically stretching it out, making it thinner and thinner as it stretches, till it almost, but not quite, breaks. I would hope there will be more than this in the tune though, as nineteen minutes of only this is going to be hard to take. It was. Well, in general I wouldn't say I enjoyed it but I didn't hate it either. It kind of was the same thing though for just shy of twenty minutes, so again I'm not quite sure why it had to be so long. But it could have been worse certainly. Oddly enough, the main theme going through it reminded me strongly of the “white noise” that Homer tried to make for Marge when she was sleeping!

And that leaves us with the closer, another long one but not as long as “Watcher”. Not quite, anyway. “Shed a tear for winter's end” (great title!) only (!) runs for fifteen minutes and change. It opens as again a pretty existential abstract sort of thing, with dark humming drone noises and what sounds like violin or something quiet in the background, a rising synth line that wails over everything like a banshee drifting over a field of corpses. Mournful, desolate and an overall feeling of loss are the kinds of moods I get from this piece, which I guess ties in with the title. Sounds like someone laughing in the distance, and then there are frogs. Are there frogs? Surely there are frogs. And someone talking, presumably in German.Wow, look at that! Ten minutes in and it doesn't seem like half that time. Mondo certainly knows how to fill up a soundscape. That talking seems to have developed into a conversation between two or more people, but kept in the background, which is good, as it melds with and complements rather than takes over or distracts from the music. Fading out nicely now. Quite enjoyable. Is that a crow at the end? Nice primordial symbol of winter, if so.

TRACK LISTING AND RATINGS

1.Cryoseism
2. Der kristall ist eis
3. Mountain village
4. Should you need a travelling companion
5. Snowhead temple
6. Watcher on the summit
7. Shed a tear for winter's end

It should be pointed out and made clear that I avoided YorkeDaddy's review of this album, and have still not read it at time of posting, as I wanted to get my own impressions and make up my own mind about it, and I was and still am sure that his perspective as a fellow musician would be so much different – and probably more on the money – than mine. So I didn't want to copy his ideas and I didn't want to be influenced by them either. What has happened, then, is that I've come to these conclusions on my own, and they are these:

This album would be great to just listen to. For review purposes it's quite hard to tackle, as often the music seems – I emphasise seems – to go in the same direction with the same melody or structure, and I'm sure it deviates wildly if you're able to detect all the little compositional tricks you guys no doubt have up your sleeves. I, however, cannot, and for most of this review I was struggling to find things to say about it. Nevertheless, and given its length, on the basis of purely being an album that is enjoyable to listen to, it would score high with me. As a review, it was a bit of a slog, but I'm still glad I listened to it, and after my previous experience of Mondo's work (The Peaks of Thock or something) I now feel a lot easier and confident that I may enjoy his other works, and not dread them, as I somewhat was before listening to this.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018