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For the past dozen or so years, Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren has been releasing albums full of romantically-rendered Southern folk interpretations for European audiences. Wooh Dang, his sparse eighthalbum, is the first to be released in the United States, and will likely help establish the 35 year-old singer-songwriter to an Americana scene that his music fits neatly into.
Over ten songs, Norgren offers a survey course of sorts in 20th century American roots music: “Dandelion Time” is a Southern blues indebted to Howlin Wolf; “The Power” draws from Smokey Robinson’s pop balladry; “Let Love Run the Game,” the album’s shining centerpiece, is a finely-tuned classic soul pastiche by way of Muscle Shoals. There’s an innocence and intensity to Norgren’s reimagination of the American South, a tendency towards straightforward appropriation countered by the careful studiousness with which Norgren approaches his source material.
But the singer-songwriter’s latest is also much more complex and multi-layered than any sort of mere blues revivalist project. The album doesn’t open so much as simply begin, with Norgren’s noodling around on a three minute instrumental soundscape (“Blue Sky Moon”) before creeping into a moody, six-and-a-half minute ballad that finds Norgren half-mumbling over brooding piano chords (“The Flow”).
That space–between Norgren’s darker, more experimental tendencies and his fresh-faced roots romanticism–provides the guiding tension in Wooh-Dang, an album that surprises, excites, perplexes and thrills over the course of its 38 minutes. “So Glad,” a four-minute meditation on the song’s titular sentiment, is a zen meditation that refuses to abandon or build upon its repetitive folk structure. It’s a gesture that frustrates as much as it challenges in its failure to deliver a building pop climax. But for Norgren, a singer who’s at his best when he’s deconstructing American folk idioms, that just may be the point.
