The Last Hurrah!! – Spiritual Non-believers – Rune Grammofon – RCD2109 - ***

HP Gundersen spotted a special guitar tuning in Crosby, Stills and Nash's Suite Judy Blue Eyes, and then spent two years playing only the modal drones it inspired, while the jazz prodigy Heidi Goodbye sang.
The resulting album, augmented by other top Norwegians, centres around the thirty minute Ballad Of Billy And Lilly, a harmony-heavy, Seventies rock reading of American roots music, with surging movements and Goodbye's insistently upbeat vocals.

The Last Hurrah!! sound like the folk-blues monk John Fahey jamming with a Van Dyke Parks orchestra, or Fleet Foxes suddenly sprouting massive Scandinavian meatball cojones.

(7/8/11)