With the hypnotic title track, the spacious ballad “Four Candles”, and a generally more varied mood, Ding Dong. You´re Dead. is the trio´s most dynamic album to date. That said, there´s still enough solid and creative riffing here to satisfy the headbangers, as well as the jazzheads, as they further explore the free and open landscapes most notably started with their Black Stabat Mater album and continued with Smells Funny.
...with Smells Funny the trio are venturing into the more free and open landscapes explored on their previous album, Black Stabat Mater.
Jazz or rock? Stonerswing? Or doomjazz maybe? For every new record by Hedvig Mollestad Trio, critics try to invent an adequate genre name for their spellbinding, uncompromising and visceral music. Classic Rock Magazine came closest: Jazz Sabbath. The band's eclectic mix of influences ranges from Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix to John Coltrane and contemporary jazz and metal music. (broadwayworld.com)
Although there is enough riffing here to satisfy the headbangers, with "Black Stabat Mater" the trio are venturing into more free and open landscapes with Mollestad truly coming into her own as a solo guitarist as well as a riffmeister previously compared to the likes of Tony Iommi and Jimmy Page. It´s also notable that extensive touring has given them a confidence boost, and once again the tracks have been laid down live in the studio with only minor overdubs.Media/Samples
Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke is a certified fan and it´s easy to see why. Double-tracked with a ghostly haze of background fuzz, Hedvig Mollestad’s lightning-rod guitar blazes a trail that comes in the wake of the heaviest guitar giants – there’s Hendrix and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi and Led Zep’s Jimmy Page swirling around the cauldron, but also the exploratory, disciplined freeplay of Pete Cosey, John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana buzzing out of her fingertips. Together with drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad and bassist Ellen Brekken, her Trio capture the full force of heavy rock and electric jazz and turn it to demonic purposes. It can be sledgehammer sludge, stoned to a crawl as on ‘Arigato, Bitch’. Or it’s nimble as a phantom on ‘Rastapopoulos’, a dizzying churn that’s named after the archvillain of Hergé’s Tintin cartoons. And for the Mollestad Trio at its intuitive, ESP-connected finest, check ‘Liquid Bridges’.
Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen is a guitar heroine for our times. She first picked up her mother’s nylon-strung acoustic guitar at the age of ten and as an exploratory teenager she dug deep into her father’s jazz and rock record collection. Then she was given an electric guitar and amplifier as a confirmation present, and never looked back. But there’s nothing pious about her music. Her molten, overdriven guitar sound is forged in the same fiery furnace as Hendrix, Tony Iommi, Jimmy Page, then plunged into a steaming vat of free jazz in the Sonny Sharrock/Fred Frith mould. In tracks like “The Rex” and “Lake Acid”, you’ll hear the megalithic riffology of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and “Rock’n’Roll”, but with an agility and intensity peculiar to the dark Northern regions where she and her bandmates were raised. “All Of Them Witches” follows the Trio’s previous Rune Grammofon release, “Shoot!” (2011) and, like labelmates Elephant9 and Grand General, represent a thrilling new progressive wave of Norwegian avant rock/free metal energy.