Frigg
Album: Polka V
Label: Sibelius Academy Folk Music
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.frigg.fi

The Finnish fiddle-centred septet will be appearing at Celtic Connections later this month at the front of a brief series of UK tour dates, so it seems an opportune moment to revisit what I believe to be their latest studio album, Polka V.

Named after the Norse goddess of love and fertility, Frigg released their debut album back in 2004, but have hitherto only once trodden our shores, when they played Shetland and Glasgow dates in 2009. As you’ll hear straightaway when the disc hits the player, Frigg’s specially exciting musical experience is rather more than just another Scandinavian fiddle-fest outfit strutting their stuff. Their freewheeling, feelgood music has been termed Nordgrass, for its creative, and seemingly entirely natural, fusing of the sensibilities of Nordic folk and American bluegrass, but that’s not the whole story it would seem, for other musical forces and influences are also heard to come into play in the Frigg melting-pot. The band’s four fiddle players are augmented and complemented variously by guitar, dobro, mandolin, cittern and bagpipes, all of which fulsome rich blend is then underpinned by double bass.

The sound they produce together, while being instantly identifiable due to its unusual blend of timbres, also renders the group dynamic marvellously versatile, enabling virtually every track on this album to sound distinctively different from its neighbours – just check out the first half-dozen tracks for a brilliantly varied sequence that takes in feisty riff-based schottische, playful animated polka, lyrical pastoral waltz and reflective newgrass.

Perhaps the level if invention is slightly lower on one or two of the later tracks, but the excitement quotient always more than makes up for that and the ensemble’s sense of internal balance remains very keen and tight throughout, whether playing fast and furious or laid-back and contemplative. The band’s intense sense of fun pervades the set, but is most joyously celebrated on the ragtime-swing of Big Brother, a co-composition by Frigg frontman/bassist Antti Järvelä (one of the three family members in the group who all hail from the same central-Finland village of their name). And as if the Frigg septet doesn’t provide a sufficiently diverse musical menu (which it emphatically does!), a couple of the album’s tracks also involve some minimal (wordless) guest vocalising from the four young ladies of Kardemimmit. Polka V is a very invigorating fusion disc, the very experience of listening to which is enough to entice one to travel some distance to see Frigg perform live.

David Kidman