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Gods Musicians
Garmarna's Guds Spelemän (Gods Musicians) shows an innovative band that's growing ever stronger and more confident. This album highlights the the beautiful voice of Emma Härdelin; she's now developed beyond a promising young singer to one of the best.
As with their previous disc Vittrad, the band have excavated the dark side of the Swedish tradition to bring forth haunting melodies and lyrics filled with blood, guts, and doomed maidens.
In the Swedish lyrics, a fleeing pregnant woman is slashed to death by a werewolf, and a handsome young man barely escapes the clutches of a horny mountain troll. Just in case these stories are too nice for you, caterpillars devastate a river valley, a girl's lover is pulled from her arms and hacked to death by her seven brothers, and a tax collector is beheaded and sent to Hell. (The CD booklet provides English translations.)
Produced by Sank (Killing Joke, Drain STH, Clawfinger, Paradise Lost), Gods Musicians envelops the listener in a spacious yet dense environment, where the hurdy-gurdy's drone and the meaty thuds of the tom-toms support original melodies welded to ancient tales of gore.
At the gala presentations for The Swedish Grammy Awards held in Stockholm on Monday February 17th 1997 the Grammy for best folk music album was awarded to Garmarna for this album.
- "I could write six reviews a year about this band if I could find an excuse. Hailing (or is that halling?) from Sweden, this rock band has one of the toughest, darkest, edgiest sounds to come around in a while. Garmarna is electrically powered, to be sure, but what it powers is unique...enough drones to drown in. ...over all of this are the vocals, especially those of Emma Härdelin. Here a band becomes a force; melodic, rhythmic, emotional... Add Garmarna's innovative musical arrangements, a purely Swedish music that pays no tithe to tradition, and it rocks. I have raved about this band before, and I will rave about it again and again. Garmarna makes sure that rock music is not only the domain of American guitars and English haircuts. This group proves it can be native, in any tongue." - Cliff Furnald, CMJ New World, November 18, 1996.
- " Named for the dogs that guard the gates of hell in Swedish mythology, Garmarna sings ancient folktales about misery and death and regret and monsters and everything else that would toment you while sitting in an igloo with a howling storm outside and the nearest Prozac a hundred miles away by dogsled. Sort of a twelfth-century version of Pink Floyd, they play mostly traditional acoustic instruments, generating a soul-uprooting drone with hurdy-gurdy, violin, viola, jew's harp and various guitars. But they also have a modern appreciation for the mystical possibilities of psychedelia and know how to use modern recording technology for ultimate resonance (the drums really thwack). So their second album "Gods Musicians" (Omnium) is just about as good as it gets for roaming around in your unconscious and confronting whatever archetypes happen to be lurking there." - Charles M. Young, Playboy, October 1996
| 1 | Vänner Och Fränder / Friends and Kin | 5:11 | MP3 Download |
| 2 | Sir Mannelig | 6:22 | |
| 3 | Halling from Macedonia | 2:45 | |
| 4 | Min Man / My Husband | 4:20 | |
| 5 | Varulven / Werewolf | 4:33 | |
| 6 | Hilla Lilla | 6:19 | |
| 7 | Drew Drusnaar / Idag som Igår | 2:46 | |
| 8 | Njaalkeme / Hunger | 5:05 | |
| 9 | Sir Holger | 4:38 | |
| 10 | Guds Spelemän / The Fiddlers of God | 3:27 |