BJØRN RIIS
Lullabies In A Car Crash/Forever Comes To An End KARISMA
Airbag guitarist’s first two solo sets revisited.
When Airbag’s frontman Asle Tostrup chose to take a break from the band to spend a year travelling, chief songwriter Bjørn Riis channelled his focus into a debut solo album, Lullabies In A Car Crash. Seven years on, it’s reissued on a white vinyl double LP format along with its solo successor, 2017’s Forever Comes To An End.
On its release, Prog summarised Lullabies as Riis “swerving into the slow lane”, and there’s no doubt it’s a quieter, more introspective affair than Airbag’s anthemically charged art rock. He’s still wearing his Floyd influences on his sleeve, but it’s perhaps a different era of that band’s output that springs to mind. The 10-minute anthem to alienation, Stay Calm, could be on a Waters-penned sequel to The Final Cut as a tinny bedroom acoustic introduces our hero softly enquiring, ‘Did your father give you hell, did you mother try to break you down?’ That theme of alienation continues through a ruminative, atmospheric journey, with moments of claustrophobic angst offering arresting pace-breaks, as with the prog metal riffs punctuating The Chase Master.
Forever Comes To An End sets its stall out more stridently, with the rising tension and pounding, melodramatic riffing that introduces the title track, but the focus turns out to be external rather than introspective. By the time lyrics and vocals first feature, on cut-adrift third track The Waves, the picture of heartbreak gets gradually more explicit as the mood drifts from sadness (in the semi-ambient, stringladen desolation of Absence) to fight-or-flight (the urgent, chase-scene soundtrack vibes of Getaway) to Winter’s bitter resignation (‘She stole my heart and she turned it into stone’).
Piano-led closer Where Are You Now keeps the emotional climate intense through some beautifully despairing guitar exorcisms until our hero forlornly begs his errant paramour to ‘take my hand, make me whole’. And Prog is left thinking, if that paramour remains unmoved, they’re probably not worth bothering with anyway.