Linnea Dale - Wait For The Morning (2018)

Linnea Dale's career outside of the almost ten-year-old Donkeyboy refugees has been broke and seekers: partly a disappointment, partly a form of resignation, one would like to acknowledge the pope's daily flies. Traditionally, this third solo album should be the final nail in the career box, before the artist draws his breath and enters into everyday life.

But some must have forgotten to convey these transformational poems to the 27-year-old from Tinn in Telemark. Instead of making an unforgettable piece of half-pop, she has done the opposite. Together with good helpers, she has completely disregarded the fashionable, partly ice-cold and quite identity-seeking poprock expression from earlier. The heat is turned up, the pace is turned down. It's like a brand new start.

Those who have followed a little will not experience that as a surprise. The first part "Favorite Mistake" was something as unusual as a song that did not try to squeeze into the mathematical assumptions that streaming technology loves. Instead, it settled with tough rhythms and lingering moods as if it were 1979. There are a lot of such long fingers to the mechanics here.

The continuation of this mindset gives the album an overall understanding that is both unusually mature and retrospectively innovative. It opens in something that could equally be the Neus seventies or William Orbit's early nineties. Particularly the latter's vocal strategies can be a guide to explaining how Dale's dunk, precise and smooth vocal extends the album. Equally share nosy and dry, but always as an integral part.