BRISKEBY TONIGHT, CAPTAIN? ALBUM UNIVERSAL RELEASE: OCTOBER 6, 2003 (NORWAY) REVIEW: OCTOBER 23, 2003

The Norwegian pop group Briskeby hit like a bomb in their home country in 2001, with their debut album “Jeans for Onassis”. It is filled to the brim with brilliant pop gems, really ingeniously constructed pop songs that still pops up in my head from time to time. They also did well in the rest of Scandinavia with their half indie - half mainstream guitar pop style.
It’s 2003 now and Lise and her friends are back again with the album “Tonight, Captain?”. The songs are immediately recognisable as Briskeby, perhaps mainly because of the vocals. It’s a fantastic, strong album, but the songs need some time to grow on you. The first album was very immediate, but this one takes longer to affect you. When you have given it a couple of listens though, it shines like a supernova.
Perhaps the influences from The Cardigans are a bit stronger this time, and there are more mellow songs to be found.
It’s hard to pick a favourite track, but “Ten Stories High” is a very beautiful love song with a massive string section. Actually, there are a lot of languorous orchestral arrangements on most compositions, for example in “Valentine” where very powerful strings lift the music to another level.
All this said, "Tonight, Captain?" is nor progressive neither inventing; it's just refining well-known elements of pop music. The album loses momentum towards the end, but the final song "The Electric Fields" puts me in a nice mood once again.
This is miles better than most of the stuff in the charts these days, and I bet (hope) Briskeby might hit once again. They sure deserve it, and perhaps they can bring some credibility to an otherwise extremely shallow and pointless mass market.

JOHAN CARLSSON