Rust
The Pond
It's Over Now
Silver Wash
Last Light
Storm
Soft Pipolarity
Blue Room
Sunday Evening
Cold
Still
Lost At Sea

Strange Fortune initiates their marketing strategy for Tor Lundvall's latest album by commenting on how many artists that you know can deliver serious and palpably emotive 'multimedia' work, inference of course that Tor Lundvall should be firmly in mind. Yet after ingesting Last Light it seems there is less multimedia here than the promo sheet would lead the listener to believe, rather the album intimates only one medium at work here. No disrespect is intended toward artist or label, but upon the reposed prelude of 'Rust', the first track of Last Light, the music proffers a not so dissimilar facet of the truer medium at work, that of Tor Lundvall himself. His visual imagery, his aural imagery elucidates a setting aswirl in chiaroscuro. While it could be said that such a statement is true of any person with the aspects of their personality, as teacher, mother, father, friend, sportsman, scholar, there is at work in "Last Light" an inimical twining of his chosen expressions into one voice.

Tor Lundvall's oil paintings are ripe in Gaussian vibrancy and the same can be found in the landscapes and rooms of "Last Light"'s music and the expressive twain could not, should not be separated, as so bonded and delicately are both sound-wave and paint-stroke masterfully presented. Tor's vocals are prominent throughout the album in roundelays and unfurling verse
as hypnotic as the perpetually gliding pads and hazed strings that lace the otherworldly journey. The fluidity of the instruments never seems to crowd similarity upon the listener and each seemingly evanescent track breathes a distance that paints more a scene by its absence of lineated form. Fear not this album as mere ethereal dream-pop, the journey is not heavenly and nor is it hellish, yet shades of darkness and light coil about lyric and melody and neither is too friendly or too familiar.

Released in a limited edition of 955 copies, the digipak is graced, as with Tor's earlier albums, with his oil paintings to set mood and starting point for what is a haunted and unforgettable surreality.

NYR