(2021) Hedvig Mollestad Trio – Ding Dong. You’re Dead.


Review:
Hedvig Mollestad follows her first solo album, Ekhidna, by rejoining her core trio for Ding Dong. You’re Dead. A precocious talent, she got her first guitar and amp as a Confirmation present. If the Holy Spirit entered Mollestad’s work at that point, then other more pagan creeds have also seeped in down the years. Drawing on heavy rock and jazz-fusion, her fretwork is rather more riff-heavy than slinky soloists such as Allan Holdsworth or Mike Stern. Mollestad’s tracks are like volcanic eruptions, bassy and rumbling, bringing a real armed invasion of sound. Her latest mystical journey has both madcap flavours and eerie experiments. “Leo Flash’s Return to the Underworld” opens on fuzzy riffage overlaid with a strutting rhythm. “All Flights Cancelled” is busy and buzzing, then the title track turns cabbalistic amid darkly brooding drums. “Four Candles” glowers with a similar nocturnal tension, “Gimbal” stays haunting and guttural, whilst the band stalks each other through a psych-jazz underworld on “Magic Moshroom.” As ever, primal forces are fully present in Mollestad’s work, like flames to brighten the blackest sky. In their differing ways, these two excellent albums remain vehement without being overblown. Fans of one should scarcely have cause to reject the other.





Tracklist:
01 - Leo Flash' Return to the Underworld
02 - All Flights Cancelled
03 - Ding Dong. You're Dead.
04 - Gimbal
05 - Magic Moshroom
06 - The Art of Being Jon Balkovitch
07 - Four Candles


Media Report:
Genre: jazz, prog-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits