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Home Groan | Addicted

Good music is good music.
CD, Stickman/Sonic Rendezvous

Tekst: Bas Ickenroth

Publicatiedatum: 22 november 2001

Rootsy Americana all the way from Norway. And they are damn good at it over there! Home Groan is the child of Norwegian-American Martin Hagfors, and together with the other band members, he's once again released an album filled with beautiful traditional country-spiced rock songs. It's the fifth Home Groan album already, but outside of Norway there's hardly anyone who's aware of these hidden treasures. Too bad indeed, because this music is too good to be forgotten. Martin Hagfors' vocals sometimes sound like a Neil Young who can actually sing on key, and his writing skills are not far from Uncle Neil either. The whole sound has that bittersweet melancholic edge which is necessary for this kind of music. Hagfors adds to this the great ability to turn his observations of life into great lyrics, with again that bittersweet content. Whether Home Groan play as intimately as can be - in 'Nothing is for Keeps' there are just vocals and guitar - or with big arrangements - as in 'Addicted to the Song', where there's room for flutes, tuba, piano, vibes, trumpets, and much more - the outcome is in any case the same: Good music is good music. Great stuff! Martin Hagfors is a very active man, because in his spare time he plays solo as Groan Alone or plays in HGH, his duo with that other Norwegian workaholic Hakon Gebhardt. He is of course one member of the hardest-working band of the last decade, Motorpsycho, but also found the time to record a solo album, and 'Trash Grass & Love Songs' is the second HGH album. Last year's 'Pignoise' was a beautiful and honest display of very traditional bluegrass, country, and folk, recorded with one mic, but for this new album Hagfors and Gebhardt made it a multi-track recording session by using two mics. Still the music is very traditional, with the use of of instruments like banjo (Gebhardt's quite an excellent banjo player.) ukulele and fiddle, but they expanded the boundaries a little bit. For instance, in 'Garbage in the Mud' there's a sudden appearance by Argentinian tango music, and the arrangements are richer than the spartan approach on the first album. But the overall feeling is that of having fun while making music, nothing more, nothing less. They greatly succeed in bringing that atmosphere across, and while having fun yourself, it isn't so much of a problem that Gebhardt isn't a real singer and that his self-written songs are not of the same level as Hagfors' solo songs. The best songs, however, come from the ones they wrote together, because they contain the best of both men, as songs like 'Me and My Buddy' and the aforementioned 'Garbage in the Mud' prove vigorously. "Me and my buddy just love music / so recording this was like a vacation," it says in the inlay. That just says it all, actually.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/home-groan/addicted/1271/
Meer Home Groan op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/home-groan