Friends & Neighbors - The Earth is # (2021)

No, Roligheten, Johansson, Grönberg, Strøm and Østvang aren’t newcomers in the Flat Earth Society. They’re stating something much more exciting than a pizza-like world: that the Earth is music, with all its flats and sustains. That music as they love it is the Sixties and Seventies free jazz sound, the one invented by the likes of Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and John Carter. Energetic and melodic free jazz, to be more specific, with simple and suggestive tunes you can sing, as pop or folk songs, but with complex, multi-layered, improvised developments that can go to the extremes of rage and joy. Friends & Neighbors are, as you know by now, a Scandinavian band, but they’re as authentic and hot driven as the real thing, and we only can distinguish them from the music played 50 years ago because they stretch those ideas from the past to the limit and go deeper with the embraced expressionism, in a sort of hyper-realistic approach. Can the metaphor of something be more than that something? Check it for yourself.