Agusa - 2015 - Två

 

The Laser's Edge – LE1073

Två is an unusually honest title: it is Agusa’s second album, it contains two side-long compositions, and everything about it depends upon the strength created when two forces move together. Swedish folk melody meets psychedelic expansion; patient repetition meets constant internal change; the grounded walking rhythm of tradition looks upward into deep space. Agusa never uses folk music as picturesque decoration. It is the load-bearing timber of these pieces, sturdy enough to support Hammond organ, wah-wah guitar, flute, shifting tempos and nearly forty minutes of instrumental travel without the structure collapsing into a heap of vintage-prog mannerisms.

“Gånglåt från Vintergatan” translates roughly as “Walking Tune from the Milky Way,” which beautifully describes its double motion. A gånglåt traditionally proceeds at the pace of a stately walk, but Agusa stretches that earthly movement toward the cosmic without losing the tune beneath it. The central melody had existed earlier in the orbit of predecessor band Kama Loka, yet here it has been expanded into a far more purposeful architecture. Jonas Berge’s organ supplies warmth and forward pressure, Jenny Puertas’s flute becomes the nearest thing the almost wordless album has to a singing voice, and Mikael Ödesjö’s guitar threads through both without demanding that the music become a vehicle for solos. Tobias Petterson and Tim Wallander keep the long form walking, turning and occasionally breaking into a run. The piece grows because the entire group keeps changing the light around its recurring theme.

“Kung Bores dans,” or “King Winter’s Dance,” enters colder and more melancholy territory. Kung Bore is the Swedish personification of winter, but this is not music depicting a cartoon snowstorm. It evokes winter as a power that alters distance, color and time. Organ, flute and guitar circle one another in a dark melodic braid while the rhythm section repeatedly changes the ground beneath them. The obvious vocabulary belongs to the late 1960s and early 1970s: Hammond swells, long instrumental development, psychedelic guitar and sudden rhythmic turns. Yet Agusa does not sound like a band dressing for a historical reenactment. The Nordic melodic grammar is too deeply embedded, giving the old equipment and forms a regional accent that belongs specifically to them.

What keeps Två alive is the band’s understanding that repetition is not the same as standing still. Each return carries a slight alteration of weight, texture or emotional temperature, so the listener recognizes the path while discovering that the surrounding landscape has changed. The album’s finest quality may be its collective patience. Nobody tries to seize the music and make it smaller through individual display; all five musicians allow the motifs to accumulate meaning through use. Two tracks are sufficient because Agusa treats each one as a complete environment, with its own weather, folklore, gravity and horizon. Två feels less like an imitation of progressive rock’s past than evidence that an older musical language can remain fertile when musicians inhabit it rather than merely quote it.