Having just released an album by her side project Hansan, all sung Swedish, Talvik now offers Wrapped In Paper, a seasonal folk-Americana collection of songs, ten original and two traditional, sung in both English and Swedish, offering different perspectives on the familiar fayre.
The opening track, ‘Let Peace Be The Song’, is in fact a wry protest number with a Christmas backdrop stripped down to just double tracked voice and guitar (“Santa I don’t know what to do the world is ending so I thought I’d write to you…Santa you should stay at home this year/No one’s been good, we are all living in fear/Tied to a fence post or a knee upon my neck/Nowhere to go no justice at my back”) as she asks “How can we push the button to rewind?”.
Featuring strings and accordion, the shufflingly uptempo ‘A.T. Christmas’ is based on a true story from the Appalachian Trail, about a lone traveller lost in the snow finding a place to take refuge, while, with cello and jazzy guitars, taking a similar line to Mud’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’, ‘Alone For Christmas’ takes a more downbeat line in a waltz of longing and loss (“The carolers are singing songs of love and cheer but I’m just longing for someone to hold me near…I watch the fire flicker but I can’t chase the gloom/All the unsaid words are hanging silently in this room”).
The first traditional is her swayalong reimagining of ‘Silent Night’ with soaring violins and open-tuned fingerpicked guitar, the tempo the picking up speed for ‘Christmas Train’, a full band twangsome number that reworks the dark Krampus legend into another anti-war protest (“Filled with guns and ammunition/They don’t give a damn about the wishing…Taking dreams and futures with them/They don’t care about the victims/They don’t care who’s going with them… There’s no mercy, there’s no pity/Good or bad, ugly or pretty”). The Polar Express it’s not.
On a warmer note, the lightly buoyant title track unwraps pedal steel and fingerpicked acoustic for a reminder that love’s the best gift (“I wanted to give you something nice for a change…But I couldn’t find a single item for sale that said I love you the most…So I don’t have a gift for you/Wrapped in paper with a bow/But if someone knows, it’s you/I can’t put it in a box/Put a ribbon on the top/Of all the love I have for you”).
A fingerpicked musing on the passing of the year (“Wrap me in the comfort of the warm and friendly memories of spring/Of summer skies when snow and ice start covering everything/Let Christmas light the darkness and guide us through the night/Till we step out in the new year, new as the morning light”), coloured with cello and horns, ‘Poem At Year’s End’ harks to tumbling 60s folk with a suitable frosty musical swirl. Sung in both English and Swedish but with a handclaps rhythm and the banjo-shaded feel of Irish balladry, ‘A Memory of Snow’ is just that (“I remember/In 1998/The snow was thick on the streets of Copenhagen/It was quiet/Like the world had gone to sleep”) but is also a reflection on letting go of a relationship with no future (“I could have opened doors/I could have let you in/But our chances were/Just too slim”).
With cello and cascading jazzy acoustic guitar notes, ‘Snowman’ again digs into the darker side with a lyric that, belying its musical shapes, plays like a folk noir horror story (“Eyes shining black like pieces of coal/Fangs gleaming sharp like those of a ghoul/Snowman in the garden you think that no one will see/Snowman in the garden what do you want from me…My friends all laugh/They think you’re a joke/They don’t feel the bones that you broke/Snowman in my bedroom/Why can’t you let me be”).
Recorded in New Orleans with layers of guitars, banjo and drums, and another jazzy undertone. she describes ‘This Mess We’re In’ as a dream-folk “doomsday carol” (“I’m looking into the ornament/The rounded surface shows me a world that’s bent…The cracking surface shows me a world/That’s spent/Maybe it is a crystal ball/An accurate tale of how/We fall”) as she asks “Can we fix this mess we’re in”.
Returning to more upbeat vibes, the swayalong waltzer ‘Jul, Jul, Strålande Jul, Strahlende Zeit’ is a Swedish Christmas hymn from 1920, here sung in both Swedish and German, the album signing off with the brief ‘Merry Christmas, Adios, So Long’, a bittersweet farewell to Christmas songs with a Disney-tinged violin arrangement that casts a sardonic eye on the whole nature of contemporary seasonal songs and albums (“The snow is falling and the stars are bright/You’ll make a million if you do it right/Write that one little Christmas song/That makes everyone hum along… Now AI writes everything for you/Horns and trumpets they all sound true/You push a button and it’s good to go”) and ends on the downbeat note that “you could wish for peace on earth/But it’s a wish that will go unheard /And everything underneath that tree/Is made in China – shipping free”. With resignation in her heart she sings “And all I wished was for you to share/My little song but you just don’t care”. Show her you do.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.sofiatalvik.com
‘This Mess We’re In’ – official video:
Thanks for stopping by. Please help us continue and support us by tipping/donating to folking.com via
You must be logged in to post a comment.