Susanne Sundfør at Røkeriet, USF Verflet, Bergen

Friday 29 and Saturday 30 May 2023

Among the things we were least expecting from Susanne Sundfør’s new live show, Rebirth of the Electro Diva must have been pretty high on the list.

First of all, she is touring a new album, blómi, and the last time she toured a new album, she played the-new-album-and-nothing-else, unless you counted the improvised, double-bass-led improvisations linking each song to the next.

Secondly, she has characterised herself as a folk artist whose flirtations with electro-pop were little more than a mathematical digression: the solving of a series of sonic puzzles ultimately pleasing to the human brain.

Increasingly, she has looked to distance herself from that record, 2015’s Ten Love Songs, in which the sorrow is swamped by triumphal dance hooks, and apparently from the life that created it: living in Dalston, smoking and drinking too much, wrecking her voice, close to breaking point.

When she has played songs from the album on recent tours, it has tended to be the eerie or spectral ones – ‘Silence’ and ‘Trust Me’ – rather than the shimmering art-pop of ‘Fade Away’, or her femme fatale monsterpiece, ‘Delirious’.

And yet here she is, on stage at USF Verflet in Bergen – a former sardine factory repurposed as the city’s coolest venue – dancing sensually to four of Ten Love Songs’s floor-filling bangers, as the synths climb a stairway to paradise.

Perhaps that’s what happens when you ask a born contrarian to headline a jazz festival.

This is the kind of love that never goes out of style

As I wrote in this recent interview piece: in spring 2018, Sundfør seemed on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough. Then she effectively disappeared. In the intervening years, she has found love, started a family, struggled with anxiety, gone back to high school, and become enormously interested in regenerative farming. Now, finally, she has returned to music. Her first album in six years, blómi was released at the end of April, and she is toying with the idea of a European tour in 2024.

In the meantime, she is playing across her native Norway all summer. The first two shows were in Bergen, headlining the city’s Natt Jazz season just metres from the riverside studio where she recorded her debut album in 2007.

When Sundfør last performed in the UK, she wore a hooded black cloak, and had apparently smeared soot around her eyes, like a Scandi druid, or an urchin Zorro. This time she has newly bleached her hair, and is clad entirely in white, down to the high-heeled PVC boots she kicks off off-stage at the midway point, so as to dance barefoot.

Her mesmerising 2017 show at Union Chapel was a spare affair, featuring just one introverted co-conspirator. For these extravagant, joyous Bergen shows, her on-stage ensemble has swelled to 15, including a pedal steel guitarist, two synth players, five backing singers, and a multi-instrumentalist husband on sax-solo-and-choral-conductor duties.

Open your eyes and begin again

The first night is an invigorating work-in-progress: the thrill of the new, and the old made new, and just the old uncovered and embraced after years in hiding. The second show, which adds a single song – a new opener; Sundfør at the centre of a crescent of 12 vocalists for the handclaps and harmonies of leikara ljóð – is the actualisation of ambition: the art, with most of the wrinkles ironed out.

In common with another legendary vocalist, Sandy Denny, what’s most exciting about Sundfør is the questing restlessness of her invention. Every version of every song she sings is given some new inflection, some new paraphrasing or twisting or variation of melody that changes its feeling and meaning. If neither rendering of ‘Turkish Delight’ here sweeps you up in the same way as the studio version – the blissful simplicity of its third act replaced by something that in its sheer jazziness sounds depressed – the trade-off is in the way that so many other songs are transfigured live. Performing the title track of ‘blómi’, Sundfør chucks in vocal trills, unexpected pauses and head-voice ad-libs that stop you in your tracks. With ‘alyosha’ – the lead single off the album – she knows what she’s got, a vehicle for the sheer scope and power of that God-given instrument, but even then she can’t resist a few experimental flourishes, while gazing across the stage, perhaps just at someone needing a musical cue, or perhaps at the guy who inspired this love song.

She does all three sitting behind her keyboard, along with ‘White Foxes’ (formerly her encore, now a first night statement-of-intent, with deafening percussion intro); a countrified version of ‘I Resign’ from her debut record; the deep cut, ‘Lilith’; and her gospel-inflected encore, ‘fare thee well’, with a glorious extra verse. For the rest, she’s at the main mic, a place she has barely ventured since 2016.

Do you believe in reincarnation?

And that’s where we find the electro-pop diva reborn. First up, she does ‘Kamikaze’, and if you’re wondering whether I’m overhyping the ‘she hasn’t done this for a while’ angle, well: she forgets the second line, consults a band mate, apologises with the words, ‘It’s been a while’, and then launches into the song again. It is one of those tracks that, to paraphrase John Peel talking about the Bluetones’ ‘Slight Return’, “as soon as you hear it, you feel you’ve known it all your life”, but now it comes with a gently wandering opening melody and added blue notes that give the song an emotional punch to go with its sonic one.

Later, she drops in ‘Fade Away’ – by far her most popular song, sporadically drowned out by the spirited singing of first-night die-hards – before returning to ‘Ten Love Songs’ for the final two tracks of the main set, ‘Slowly’ and ‘Delirious’. The latter now has a pleading pedal steel, and rap-adjacent vocals breaking off into clubby exhortations. The former is, simply, one of the best things I’ve ever heard live, especially in its second night iteration. It is notable on record for having at least four separate, irresistible hooks, each more exalting than the last (scroll to 3:08 to be lifted into the clouds). And now it has five. “It’s in the way. You. Hold. Me,” Sundfør sings, in a cascading, staccato arpeggio, as the song reaches its zenith. “Baby. I. Know. You’re. Lonely.”

The other songs she sings at centre stage are a playful ‘Reincarnation’, and ‘rūnā’, in which she seems to be conjuring the music through the contortions of her body, like Judy singing ‘The Man That Got Away’ in A Star Is Born. And between the notes she finds new ones, more beautiful than those on record, before riding the climactic harmonies, swaying, her arms spread wide.

A couple of times during the show, she leaves the stage, firstly for the synth transition between ‘Kamikaze’ and ‘rūnā’, and later to let the rest of the cast perform an a capella version of ‘ashera’s song’, reimagined as an old American spiritual, the original number spliced with fragments of atonal bluegrass, ‘Peace in the Valley’ and ‘Let Your People Go’. While both numbers are interesting, neither are quite what drew us to Bergen tonight.

Take me high to the depths of your soul

On the first night, I made a new friend called Thomas, and when we talked about what had drawn us to Sundfør’s music, we were of one mind: once that voice grabs you, there’s no going back.

These songs are beautifully written, the sprawling arrangements are often inspired, there’s space for limited musical improvisation, and the band are talented and charismatic, with the backing singers allowed to cut free and even encroach on some signature Sundfør lines.

But we are here, and will always be here, for That Voice. That it is now allied to the whole of her canon, even the emotionally tricky, musically mathematic bits, is a cause for dancing, in Bergen and far beyond.

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SETLIST:

leikara ljóð [second night only]
White Foxes
Turkish Delight
Kamikaze
rūnā (with synth transition intro)
Reincarnation
I Resign
blómi
Fade Away
Lilith
alyosha
ashera's song (new version, choir only)
Slowly
Delirious

Encore:
fare thee well

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Thanks for reading.