(Jazz-Rock, Fusion) [WEB] Chrome Hill (Asbjorn Lerheim, Atle Nymo, Roger Arntzen, Torstein Lofthus) - The Explorer - 2018 [Clean Feed], FLAC (tracks), lossless

Tell me what was your first love in music and I'll tell you who you are. That's what you could say about guitarist Asbjørn Lerheim, who played blues and rock before being interested in jazz and now plays blues and rock (and folk, inevitably linked to both) in a jazz context with the band Chrome Hill, formerly known as Damp.
And what a band, the also member of Lisan Dillan's Quiet Quiet Project having the company of likeminded souls: Roger Arntzen (In the Country, Ballrogg, Trail of Souls), Torstein Lofthus (Elephant9, Shining) and Atle Nymo (Motif, Saxwaffe, Atle Nymo Quartet), the last replacing Jørgen Munkeby (Shining), who became one of the most predominant figures of the Scandinavian heavy metal scene.
Much can be said about the capacity of this younger generation of musicians to play several genres and use diversified music vocabularies (not necessarly the ones they embraced at the beginning of their careers), but even more interesting is the fascination for Americana here revealed and happening often in the North of Europe: these guys can play Appalachian folk songs, Delta blues and red neck rock as if they were born on the inner guts of the United States of America, doing it without ever losing their identity as jazz improvisers. Be marveled, people.

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That’s not news now: Scandinavian jazz is in love with Americana, importing aspects of Country & Western and Appalachian folk, and even using its instruments, in projects gradually difficult to categorise. Each project still individually unique, and like their fellow countrymen Huntsville, who mixes banjo and pedal steel guitar with Indian tabla machine and shruti boxes, Chrome Hill uses the typical sound of the surf guitar style of bands like The Surfaris, The Mermen, Eddie & the Showmen or The Ventures, with lots of reverb and tremolo. A kind of sound treatment you also wouldn’t expect from a combo profoundly influenced by Texan-Mexican rock done such brilliantly, like this one lead by Asbjørn Lerheim on baritone guitar. Lerheim is not alien to this kind of mixes: he is an important contributor to Lisa Dillan’s Quiet Quiet Project, with its reformulation of Elvis Presley’s songs. After four Chrome Hill albums (two of them under the name Damp), the saxophone was played by Shining leader Jørgen Munkeby. Atle Nymo (the same of Motif and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra) is now pointing out a new direction, giving a more melodic character to the music. He is the needed contrast to the dense and dirty rhythmic support given by In the Country bassist Roger Arntzen and Elephant9 drummer Torstein Lofthus and to the profound, earthy guitar work developed by Lerheim. You’ll get addicted. ~waysidemusic.com