Susanne Sundfør - Music for People in Trouble
Sep 19, 2017 (updated Sep 19, 2017)
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The feeling of being carried away, not cherished, not nourished, not taken care of, but carried away by life may strike many as a shock too harsh to handle. And it is, if one suddenly realizes he or she has been cast away like a leave driven aimless by the wind. The utter sense of helplessness that overtakes us all, inevitably, at a certain point of our lives.

Responsible for one of 2015's most intriguing synthpop releases, norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør's Music for People in Trouble is as soothing and intimate as its considerably off-putting title suggests: a work of sheer innate acknowledgement and search for the meaning of one's own place in the big, wide world surrounding us.

For such an equally wide and possibly bleak subject matter, Music for People in Trouble sounds incredibly unique in its own right. Much like many of her previous works, Susanne displays an exquisite mastery of a handful of genres that don't really sound like they could work together, but, for no one's surprise, the very talented artist manages to pulls it off: there is beauty in each and every single track of this album, even in the weirdest of moments ("The Golden Age" spooky intro and its persistant dissonant strings).

While many could go into this one expecting to hear more electronic, nocturnal beats flourishing inside Susanne's one-of-a-kind musical world, she proves once again to be on the far-end of the musical spectrum when talking about pop music, whatever the hell that means. One of the album's most beautiful and haunting pieces, "Reincarnation" is near-country-styled music with flashes of psychedelic infusions that are so abstract and patient, all attempts at categorization not only sound flat, but incredibly out of place. With due respect to your Dolly Partons and Lucinda Williamses, one can only wonder where can such starkingly profound and thought-provoking lines be found: 'Do you believe in reincarnation? / 'Cause I thought I saw your soul / Flashing and dancing on the horizon'. So it goes.

While song titles like "Mantra", "Reincarnation", "No One Believes in Love Anymore" may get unadvised bypassers scratching behind their ears saying that 2017 is no year to be going head over heels over religious matters, the incredibly touching and nuanced songwriting Susanne is well-known for is finding its place through a maze of immensely disappointing comeback releases by huge midia-endorsed indie-rock bands, actually saying what people, in 2017, really need to hear. Actually, feel what they need to feel. That is a more honest, powerful way of doing music.

And what exceptional moments does she lay down here for us. What moving, sensible antics does a song like "The Sound of War" display, with its light, cherishing atmospheric-folk first half and its inexplicably meaningful call-to-personal-arms contrasting with the surrealistic later part, all Jenny Hval-like in its strange modus operandi, strangely making all sense in the world.

Regardless of how beautiful and aesthetically-expanding this release is, it is in the nearly paradoxical bridge between inwardness and self-discovery encouragement and the hollistic empathy that Susanne preaches that lies this album's greatest strenghts, its capacity to speak for multitudes, despite us knowing pretty well that it is not going to happen - not in the way, say, James Murphy will manage to do with his new album. Anyways, there is more to "Undercover" than its surface-scratching motivational speech, and so it goes.

In time, Music for People in Trouble can be confusing in its pluralistic imagery depiction. While it holds a tremendous heart-warming message above all its soothing layers of instrumental bliss, it still shows Susanne's incontrollable search for new sounds and crazy ideas, resulting in a few spots that don't necessarily feel like they belong here (the very subjective portrayal of an intense personal experience in the woods told distantly by an encouraging monologue backed by weird field-recordings in the title-track is a fine example), as much as the confusing religious suggestions that can't always escape one's sight.

Technicalities and album-flow criticizing boredoms aside, it must be said that this is definitely one of the most cherisheable, meaningful and thought-provoking releases of the year. One that so open-mindedly induces us to think about an urgent matter as depression in a completely different way, one that urges us to stop and listen to life's signals, to the way time and life itself seems to do us, in so many different levels. One that makes us think and feel how tiny and apparently meaningless our existences are, but at the same time encouraging us listeners to find the answers for ourselves, her lyrics guiding us in a spiritual journey as distinct and sensible as we can only find in the literature work of the likes of Hermann Hesse.

Hadn't Susanne decided to craft such beautifully-written songs and show-stopping sounds wrapped in a single album format, we would already have something really special to brood and reflect upon, but the fact is that she did, and for that she deserves all the praise in the world. Stop, and listen.

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