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Review: 'TALVIK, SOFIA'
'Big Sky Country'   

-  Label: 'Makaki Music/Caroline/Universal'
-  Genre: 'Alt/Country' -  Release Date: '14th April 2015'

Our Rating:
With five full length albums and numerous EPs, singles and tours behind her, Sofia Talvik from Stockholm sets her sights on conquering the U.S. of A with this new album.

Preparation included a 16 month, 37 state long tour in a camper van. As the first Swede to play at Chicago's Lollapalooza festival, she is plainly making inroads.

Nevertheless, growing up in Sweden means her music has a strong Scandinavian flavour so there are still significant logistical hurdles to overcome. A few twangy guitars and a banjo does not an Americana album make.

Sometimes, writing in second language means that artists don't have a keen enough sense of what sounds odd. This can give songs a quirky charm or, as is often the case with Talvik's lyrics, can come across as awkward and contrived.

For instance, the 'Home On The Range' reference in Give Me A Home ("where the buffalo roam") is, frankly, a bit farcical coming from a Swedish tourist.

In So, (as in I love you so) she sings of a "fear that sometimes makes your feet go numb" and, in Bonfire her heart is at the other end of the temperature scale "burning for you in the night like a bonfire". These clunky lines drop like lead balloons because she is obviously trying to be original and poetic.

Another example is Starwalker in which the words are simplistic to the point of being embarrassingly banal. The song appears to be about some form of faith healer and she sings: "Starwalker he's a friend of mine, you've seen him looking fine ......[he] don't drink no wine".

All this makes you wonder if Lullaby was meant to be so dark as this line suggests : "It is summer and everything is beautiful, still you wish you were dead".

The album as a whole is described as "a storybook of emotions" rather than a travelogue but this is plainly not true of the title track and accompanying video.

Big Sky Country, the song, is about travelling down the U.S. highways. Talvik enthusiastically name checks some of the places she's passed through. and gushes about her "everlasting love for this place" before naming the state of Idaho as the best of all.

Ultimately, however, mention of these locations is superfluous given that the sonic identity of this album resides somewhere in limbo land.   



Sofia Talvik's website
  author: Martin Raybould

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TALVIK, SOFIA - Big Sky Country