VELVET THUNDER

The reissuing of remastered versions of the White Willow catalogue continues unabated with this being the fifth of the planned series of six. We had previously left White Willow in 2004 with Storm Season and here we forward just two years, but Signal To Noise is an example of just what a difference two years can make in the music industry. By 2006 White Willow were ready to break out from their overt ‘70s prog influences and they hired an external producer for the first time (Tommy Hansen) with a mandate to update their sound. The result was Signal To Noise, an album that certainly steered away from the heavy use of mellotron and flute which give a strong King Crimson feel to a lot of their work, but was still a prog album at heart.

Signal To Noise is not looked upon by fans as one of their best, and it suffers somewhat by being in the shadow of Storm Season which is generally considered to be their finest. In these situations, there’s risk of fans broadly categorising a whole album as poor and thus throwing out the proverbial baby with the bath water. The baby in question on Signal To Noise is surely The Lingering, a ten-minute slab of vintage White Willow. Jacob Holm-Lupo’s gentle guitar opens the piece leading to a pleasant sultry vocal section supported principally by piano. As is often the case with White Willow, the meat of the track is in the instrumental sections and here the energetic interplay between Holm-Lupo and Lars Fredrik Frøislie’s keyboards is impressive as it builds up to a stirring Moog solo from Frøislie. There’s something of a false ending at around the six-minute mark before a quiet build-up towards the fine solo from Holm-Lupo that caps the piece.  Those sultry vocals I mentioned are courtesy of Trude Eidtang. Long-time singer Sylvia Erichsen had been well-suited to the pastoral material of White Willow’s early albums but was challenged by the heavier material on Storm Season and chose to leave the band. Eidtang demonstrated to be a more than worthy successor and was clearly more at ease with this material.

There are two other lengthy prog tracks, Splinters and Chrome Dawn, both of which brought Camel to my mind. Splinters is the better of the two, thanks mainly to the imposing synth theme that confidently opens the piece. It doesn’t live up to that promise though as a rather dull vocal section, initially folky and then backed by chugging guitars, meanders along a little aimlessly. Towards the end, the opening theme returns gently on guitar and then inspiringly with the full band, but it’s not enough to mask the mediocrity of the central part of the song. Chrome Dawn is an instrumental with Holm-Lupo’s reflective guitar work presumably intended to portray a colourless Nordic dawn in Winter. He does pretty well if that’s the case, but the frigid soundscape never warms up at all. Frøislie might have been suffering from frost bite too since his usual creative contributions seem weak and uninspiring in this song.

The shorter tracks perhaps better reflect the band’s desire to distance themselves from their classic ‘70s prog sound. Night Surf and Dusk City are both straight forward rock songs with a modern edge to the production. Joyride, instead, is pure pop, almost like a cheerful version of a number by The Smiths. It probably had White Willow fans pulling their hair out at the time since it’s so different to anything they had done before, but those same fans might be able to listen to it now and recognise a very well written pop song when they hear it.

The album closes with a pleasant bit of guitar doodling that lasts 98 seconds. It could have been a brilliant opening for a monumental prog epic but instead just fades away inconclusively. And in some ways that sums up the album. There are lots of flashes of White Willow brilliance, and there’s that one song, The Lingering, that stands comparison with White Willow’s best, but the usual high standard of creativity is simply missing. It’s worth getting for existing fans of the band, especially since it’s been expertly remastered (by Holm-Lupo), but for anyone looking for an introduction to the band, I would recommend starting with Storm Season or one of its predecessors.