BJORN RIIS: Forever Comes To An End (PROGRESSIVE ROCK): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Bjorn Riis is the founding member of the Norwegian band Airbag. Great admirer of David Gilmour (he has actually opened a Facebook page dedicated to this admiration), the guitarist and singer releases in this first half of the year his second album, "Forever Comes To An End". After a first solo foray named "Lullabies In A Car Crash", very successful, although too close to his original band, Bjorn went back to work by tackling a dark theme: the one of the sentimental break-up, propitious to transmit as many emotions as such a situation can cover.

Thus, the album sifts through the different psychological stages of the split up ones. First the anger and the regrets already seem to open the hostilities with a rough guitar with a raging riff close to Black Sabbath that the Norwegian cites among his inspirations. The atmosphere is immediately tense and dramatic, illustrating a rupture that becomes unavoidable. This feeling evolves musically towards relatively peaceful atmospheres, almost plaintive, like a desperate plea between the protagonists, to try to give each other a second chance which in the end will not happen, as the name of the title suggests: 'Forever Comes To An End' whose conclusion gives the opportunity for Bjorn to propose a solo of which he has the secret: guaranteed shivers. After this Dantesque beginning, in which the talented musician leaves his comfort zone, the piano takes over and testifies of the 'Absence' and this emptiness felt after this separation that some guitar notes will come to densify. The whole is completed by the breath of the wind, a symbol of solitude.

Closer to the previous works, 'The Waves' describes the emotional state of the characters between acoustic guitar on which are grafted the electric and melancholic wanderings of the Stratocaster. Then comes the time of escape, running to create the illusion of not suffering anymore, with 'Getaway', a surprising instrumental track made of a keyboard loop on which Bjorn has fun to let his imagination run free in an atmosphere close to Porcupine Tree. Taking over this path in which, in this situation, everyone can find himself, 'Winter' quietens the game by an introspection supported by the beautiful voice of Sichelle Mcmeo Aksum. This song imagines a dialogue in which the separated question themselves inwardly, perhaps regretting, imagining what it would have been like if they had acted differently, the whole shaken by the tumults in the form of more aggressive riffs. Where Are You Now', a title with an evocative name, concludes in a melancholic way this album on the skin where the guitar constitutes the extension of the tears of the musician facing this separation often difficult to accept.

The album as a whole is very coherent and less demonstrative than Bjorn's solo interventions in Airbag. Here, the concept takes precedence over the guitar hero and each instrument brings its stone to the edifice, helped in this sense by the members of the original combo from which he comes (Henrick Fossum on drums and Asle Tostrup on programming) and by Simen Valldal Johannessen (from the band Oak) on the piano, which takes a bigger place and brings a touch of nostalgia and sadness.

More varied than his previous album, still as disenchanted and fatalistic, "Forever Comes To An End" is not recommended to the depressed. Sensitive and touching, retranscribing the stages of a love break-up of which it would be the camera, it probes the soul. The album is one of the beautiful successes of this year. - Official website

BJORN RIIS

FOREVER COMES TO AN END

KARISMA RECORDS

PROGRESSIVE ROCK