There are two extremes to Sol Heilo.
One the one hand she can write lightweight, frivolous songs, often complete with a lively banjo accompaniment and of the variety that you can’t resist getting up and dancing to. It’s a continuation of what she used to do with Katzenjammer, whether or not she’d created the song herself.
On the other hand there is darker content and again there always has been. Think for example of ‘A bar in Amsterdam’, ‘Tea with Cinnamon’, ‘Wading in Deeper’, ‘Virginia Clemm’, ‘Lady Marlene’ and ‘Lady Grey’ from the Katzenjammer era, most of them vocalised by Sol. Some of them jolly, others sad, but all having a darker motif to them.
And then in her solo career. On her debut album ‘Skinhorse Playground’ there are only two ‘happy ‘ songs out of nine, and they bookend the album, which also includes observations on the hardships she faced when living in London, terrible events in her own country, a gaslighting lover, and the death of a relative.
The opener, ‘America’, hides behind a sparkling melody the false dawns that the US can offer its citizens while the closer, ‘Happy Song’ is anything but as she craves the camaraderie of friends possibly lost forever.
“Come play a happy song…” she laments, “I would do it for you”, to a catchy melody line that could be the chime of an ice cream van.
She’s a walking, talking box of contradictions and so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that she introduces her latest single, ‘Black Crow Cloud’, by describing the content as “dark matter” and adds, “sometimes when I’m sad, I seek comfort in listening to sad songs. When I’m dark, I listen to dark music. It’s like minus and minus is plus, in the state of mind.”
The mere mention of a black crow should set the alarm bells ringing. How many times have they turned up in films as the harbinger of misfortune or even death? The final wave of attack in The Birds came from crows. In Brandon Lee’s last film, The Crow was a link between the Underworld and this one.
One of them is a killer in end of days film 28 Days Later, Stephen King’s The Stand used a crow as its flagship symbol, both Charlize Theron and Madonna have taken the form of a swarm of crows in films and videos and in Damien: Omen II, an overly inquisitive journalist has her eyes pecked out by one before she gets totalled by a truck.
So forewarned and forearmed we suspect we know what’s coming but even then the tone of the song is quite different from anything we’ve heard from Sol Heilo previously, it being dominated by overlapping and syncopated acoustic guitar melodies that have ‘deep south’ etched into them and enlivened by a neat steel guitar bridge..
She’s shifted from the halfway house of Nordicana we’ve experienced before now to outright, full on gloomy Americana and does it extremely effectively. I don’t believe for a second that any US listener down Austin or Nashville way would believe ‘Black Crow Cloud’ is the product of someone from Oslo (or Baerum to be precise) and she certainly bares her feelings here; so much so that she drew the image you see here to try to make those feelings even more tangible.
(I often thought that she could be a doyen of multimedia if she chose to be and wish she’d do a show with video backdrops of her art to add even more meat to her songs).
The lyrics were provided by Jason Samson Breland, one of several new names I’ve seen connected with her recently. Unfortunately my knackered old ears can’t often make them out these days, especially when Sol delivers them in that husky manner that falls somewhere between fragile little girly and Xena: Warrior Princess.
It seems to recall the US Depression, perhaps set in the Appalachians, a la The Waltons, as decent folk surviving through hard times have to face up to further impositions put on them by humans and Daddy is resolved to do whatever it takes to protect the family.
But it could be applied to any situation you imagine, including war and civil conflict, the common denominator being that ‘Black Crow Cloud’ bearing down on you, carried by the wind of your uncertain future.
I have no idea if this is going to be Sol Heilo’s new style going forward, or whether it’s a one-off. All I know for sure is that she never fails to come up with the goods and to live up to expectations.
Like everyone else I hope we might see her in concert again soon. It’s been a long time, Solveig.
Find her on:
Website: https://www.solheilo.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/solheilo Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/solheilo/
