I suppose many musicians must “lose their way” at some time or other just as we critics do. For some it came during the pandemic, which either spurred them into action in a ‘we shall overcome’ manner or was too crushing for them to resist so that they just faded away.
For Albert af Ekenstam it was the death of his father in 2018 and a difficult separation that caused him to lose touch with his ‘creative self’ and to go into exile for six years.
Indeed his last album was even further back in time, almost nine years.
There are equally saviours, or guardian angels, or whatever you want to call them in the business and collaborators such as producer Filip Leyman and artist Sumie Nagano helped him back over the line once he had rediscovered his discipline.
To be frank I hadn’t heard of him but then my excuse is I haven’t been writing about Nordic music for nine years.
It didn’t take me long to realise that there is real quality here.
I’m making some assumptions but I’m reading this single, ‘Ghost in us’, which will also be the album title, as a paean to his father. I say that for two reasons.
Firstly, his 2016 album, ‘Ashes’ was a tribute to his mother so he has form in the matter and secondly the recent NMC review of the video for Nightwish’s ‘Lantern Light’ – the song of the year for me and which definitely was such a paean and which put me on high alerts for such statements.
The title and some of the lyrics seem to suggest the continuation of life in the form of what is left behind within the descendant(s); a similar theme to that adopted in the Nightwish song.
I can’t easily position him musically. ‘Ghost in us’ starts off as a Leonard Cohen-like ballad of lament but without picking up any pace evolves into a very powerful piece of synthesised orchestration with unearthly tones.
I just watched the reopening ceremony for the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on television and that latter section could have preceded or followed Macron’s oration, it has that degree of majesty about it.
We are promised much of the same with the album, in which “the intensity of post-rock meets the intimacy of the singer-songwriter.”
The ‘Ghost in us’ album will be released on 14th March 2025 on the Welfare Sounds label.
Find him on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/albertgustafjohannes
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/albertafekenstam/
