Susanna Wallumrød, the Norwegian singer-songwriter, closed her London show with a desolate, unsettlingly reharmonised cover of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart. It made an apposite encore, since this unique artist had spent much of the previous 80 minutes quietly tearing the emotions of her listeners apart, and just as attentively putting them back together again.
"For those who don't know me, I am Susanna," she told the St Luke's audience, before gesturing toward her guitarist Helge Sten and drummer Erland Dahlen. "But tonight we all three are Susanna." She had a point, since the Deathprod/Supersilent guitarist's quivering bottleneck and tremolo sounds, and Dahlen's spooky musical-saw effects and mallet-driven percussion, were often inseparably fused with her voice and stripped-down piano lines.
The trio are showcasing material from this year's Wild Dog album, alongside favourites going back to 2004, when Susanna began to entrance audiences in the duo Susanna and the Magical Orchestra, with Morten Qvenild on keyboards. The current band plays rougher, more interactive and directly soulful music, but the impact is just as hypnotic.
Susanna's pealing-bell long notes and understated dynamic shifts subtly sketched her song Imagine, and gained force against the stamping pulse and guitar buzz of Demon Dance. She's given to quirky volume-changes while shaping a sustained sound, which influences the balance of impulsiveness and stillness in her music. Her whispered, fearfully reverential account of Dolly Parton's Jolene went quiet and seemed to have ended, before the intruder's name returned on a terrifying rising repeat. Wild Horse, Wild Dog was a love-as-madness nightmare revealing Susanna's soul power; and a sublime blend of a clear, hymn-like vocal (on a poem by Norwegian writer Gunvor Hofmo) with distant saw and bottleneck sounds, made for a contrasting sound-texture piece. It was music created for the sake of it, without a hint of calculation beyond the honing of an inimitable craft.
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