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Two themes dominate Blaue Blume’s new album Bell Of Wool, darkness and adventure. With the record mostly made before singer Jonas Smith slipped into a depressive episode, the album’s lyrics and moods draw pictures of the darkness, anxiety and tension that would mark Smith’s depression:
“A lot of the lyrics kind of draw these states of mind and situations that I actually found myself in, just months after I had written them”, he says. But ultimately Smith, and the band, pulled through, and the completed Bell Of Wool marks a step forward for a new and bolder era of their work.
The album’s title comes from the sense of helplessness Jonas was afflicted with, and a dream that provided him with the metaphor for the trapped listlessness he was feeling: “I dreamt this title, and it’s not even a cliché, it actually happened”, he says. “I woke up and wrote the title on a piece of paper. I remember seeing this bell in front of me and seeing it ringing, but I wasn’t able to hear it. It was a very small image, but it was such a nightmare because my idea of a bell was totally changed, because its function had been taken from it”. Music, and the band, were a way out of the darkness for him: “It made sense to make that a sticker for the record, and then we could make the music the ringing of the bell”.
Sonically, the album sounds a distance away from anything they’ve done before. Indie and electro pop and rock are out, and instead the album is crafted from soft, glowing synthscapes, dawns and skies transformed into sounds. Even on hints of their older work, like on the acoustics of “Rain Rain”, the synthwork comes into the picture and swells the song into something bigger and more majestic. Opener “Swimmer” introduces the listener to the softness and subtlety of the new sound, whereas songs like “Morgensol” and “Bombard” show it at its biggest and more grand.
The adventure comes into the songwriting on
the new album, which saw the trio determined to escape the restraints of conventional songwriting, and put together something more intuitive. “I think for the first time, we’ve managed to do something that wasn’t thought-through to the end before we recorded it”, says Søren. “We didn’t plan it out, and there wasn’t a blueprint. We’ve always been excessive demomakers, to figure everything out before the final take. This time we recorded things just if they felt good before it made sense and that feeling stuck in the music. That’s why I think we can play it, a year and a half later, and it still feels surprising. That’s a strength for me, that I hope people will get it”.
