HEDVIG MOLLESTAD TRIO

Ding Dong. You’re Dead. RUNE GRAMMOFON

Some artists begin their recording careers cautiously, slowly and subtly coaxing the listener into their sound world, gradually finding their way into their strengths and creative approaches. Others don’t so much arrive on the scene as explode across it, apparently fully formed and taking absolutely no prisoners. It’s long been clear to anyone with a pair of functioning ears which side of that line the Hedvig Mollestad Trio emphatically belong.

THE FEARLESSNESS THAT DRIVES THEM IS FRONT AND CENTRE.

From their fiery 2011 debut Shoot! and across the trio’s subsequent six releases, Mollestad, bassist Ellen Brekken and drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad haven’t been slow in coming forward. As each album has added another wave of surging momentum, they trash any generic barriers that happen to get in the way with an attitude that doesn’t care if it’s prog, metal, jazz or anything else you want to throw at them.

Last year saw a pause in the seemingly unstoppable progress of the band with the release of Mollestad’s acclaimed debut solo album, Ekhidna, on which she added keyboards and brass in a sextet setting for her guitar, proving herself to be a nuanced arranger for a wider tonal range. Now back with her regular collaborators, she digs deeper into the instrument, unleashing waves of taut melodics along with her savvy use of power chords.

The fearlessness that underpins and drives the trio can be found front and centre on Leo Flash’ Return To The Underworld. A bulldozing motif that evokes Lifetime-era John McLaughlin in a head-on collision with the metal debris of King Crimson’s Red. It doesn’t so much open the album as detonate it. Mollestad’s nimble, elasticated lead guitar occupies the sonic high ground as Brekken and Bjørnstad’s rhythm section constantly burrow below, adding and subtracting across the beat while never missing their mark.

Here, as elsewhere, the numerous benefits of their decadeplus partnership become abundantly clear as unexpected shifts in gear are achieved with a frequently jaw-dropping, preternatural ability. Be it empathy or telepathy or ‘WTF did they just do?’, the emotional impact in these relatively brief pieces is absolutely spine-tingling.

The beautiful ballad Four Candles closes the record. Like the calm after the storm, volume pedal swells confer a teary smear, not unlike a pedal steel guitar to Mollestad’s sound. Swimming in reverb, as her colleagues conjure clouds of vaporous shapes, her notes bend and shiver, bright like the shimmering trail of a slo-mo meteor glimpsed through the dark of space. An album that’s as bone-crunchingly powerful as it is graciously poetic, this is surely their best yet.