Hedvig Mollestad Trio: Enfant Terrible

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen (g)
Ellen Brekken (b)
Ivar Loe Bjørnstad (d)

Label:

Rune Grammofon

June/2014

Catalogue Number:

RCD 2157

RecordDate:

date not stated

Norwegian axe-woman Hedvig Mollestad was born in the early 1980s, but her music's primary influences were all in full swing at least a decade before that. The low-down blues-rock power-crawl of opening track ‘Laughing John’ carries all the sweaty swagger of classic Led Zeppelin, while the plodding riffage of tracks like ‘La Boule Noire’ aims for the moody doom-mongering of prime Black Sabbath. That said, Mollestad's more than just a rock-metal fret-witch: her solos display a sensitivity for the less obvious possibilities of the electric guitar, with whammy bar swoops and high, glacial whinnies that nudge up against the high-impact techniques pursued by Finnish-American guitarist Raoul Bjorkenheim. Even so, Mollestad's trio don't quite have the chops to match Bjorkenheim's Scorch Trio in terms of off-the-scale energy: the free-form freak-out of ‘Rastapopoulos’ sounds more like the time-wasting noodle Noel and Mitch used to roll out to accompany Jimi Hendrix's smashing of the amps.

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