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Unreleased Beauty
Album/Pop
Sissel
"All Good Things"
Mercury/Universal
A finely honed production and well-made pop without distinctive quality.
After years with childbirths, American flirtations and dawdling, Sissel has created a pop album slightly above average. In the pop genre, however, the average is rather low and "All Good Things" is therefore more for those who already like Sissel, rather than those who love exciting pop music. Although the album is an enormous musical update on Sissel's part, it has a sedate, unexciting stamp of pomp, beauty and clichés. Despite a lot of beautiful music, there hangs something unreleased over the whole, which makes the false emotion and empty phrases capture one's attention at the cost of the melodies and Sissel's impressive voice.
The best example is the title track, "All Good Things," which should have been the album's best moment. Morten Abel has created a near perfect pop song with a sparse, exciting arrangement, which of all things reminds of Poor Rich Ones. Unfortunately, Sissel shoots the whole project in the foot with her lack of familiarity with English plural conjugations: "All Good Things comes to the one who waits," she sings, over and over again. Such things ruin the whole, this is elementary, the correct form - "come" - is even printed right in the CD liner notes!
Perhaps Sissel should have stuck to Norwegian? She does so, at least, on "Lær meg å kjenne," which follows. After the faux pas on "All Good Things," this sacred hymn is the album's best track. Hymns are familiar parts for Sissel, and the singer's intimate understanding is much more obvious here than on the pop songs.
But it's pop Sissel wants to be and most of "All Good Things" lies halfway between Whitney Houston, Enya and Celine Dion. The lyrics are basically stereotypical love nonsense, but the music sounds at times quite good. The opening track, "Weightless" (the only song left from the USA-recording), the lullaby "Sarah's Song" (which Sissel helped write) and the duet with Espen Lind, "Where The Lost Ones Go," are all beautiful.
Lene Marlin's hushed "We Both Know" is also pretty, but Marlin's other contribution, "Should It Matter," is a boring exercise in the ballad genre. The same applies somewhat to "Keep Falling Down" and the pompous single "One Day." The most dull is Alf Bretteville-Jensen's "Better Off Alone" - the verses annoyingly remind one of Elton John's "Nikita," while the refrain is so tired that it is inconceivable that anyone would want it on their album.
And so there's no one that completely understands what Sissel wants, besides looking after her home. Like an old woman with the stream, she flies over the pop terrain, seldom adapted, never on the edge. Certainly "All Good Things" is a good album which will find it's place on the record shelves, but couldn't that place have been given to artists with less voice and more heart?
Review by Erik Fossen, translated from Norwegian by Robert A Jones