Even the cover is shimmering, warm and bright

When I got out of the Air Force far too many years ago, I got myself a job at a convenience store, working the graveyard shift. It meant I could listen to any radio station I liked while doing the mopping at 3:30 a.m. One night, I heard a song that stopped me in my tracks. Against a musical backdrop that had all the warmth of a winter night in Norway, a woman sang about receiving an intravenous injection, pronouncing it "inTRAvenous." As the song unfolded, it became clear she was singing from the point of view of a woman in a coma after a terrible accident, wishing to die as the doctors worked to save her. I was spell-bound. Both musically and lyrically, I had never heard anything like it. The band was Bel Canto from Norway.

The next day I went to a music store and bought their CD White-Out Conditions. It was their first CD, and it was gorgeous. Nils Johansen and Geir Jenssen provide a sweeping canvas for Anneli Drecker's soft yet dramatic voice. The only problem with the CD was that it didn't have "Intravenous." So I went back to the store and bought Birds of Passage, which did have it. Again, the band created a wonderfully melancholy, ethereal sound as cold as an Oslo morning.

It was a few years before I realized they had released a third album, 1992's Shimmering, Warm & Bright. By this time, Jenssen had left the band, making it a duo of Johansen (music) and Drecker (lyrics). It seems Jenssen must have been the source of all the bitter cold atmosphere on the first two albums, because Shimmering, Warm & Bright was every bit as warm as the title. The sound was slightly softer, but it had not lost it's bite.

Drecker's voice was more up front, and there were more real instruments instead of synthesizers. The sound was somewhere between the dream-like pop of Cocteau Twins and the enigmatic, literate pop of Kate Bush. Drecker has a surprising knack for singing in multiple languages, from Norwegian to French to English to Spanish to German to several others. On Shimmering, she puts that skill to great use, weaving stories that captivate the imagination. Johansen's music shows that his other gig, writing film music, hasn't gone to waste. He creates dramatic, lush songs with a deft combination of real and synthesized instruments. Strings and horns in unusual yet beatutiful combinations sweeten the sound.

A well-written European fairy-tale is a creepy, frightening thing. There is a magic quality that makes the real world seen false, and the false real. Bel Canto's Shimmering is exactly that, a frighteningly creepy, well-written fairy-tale. In "Die Geshichte Einer Mutter", Drecker sings in German, looking for her missing son in a world that surely came out of one of the Brother Grimm's more sinister dreams. "Spiderdust" is a beautiful evocation of madness. The final song, "Mornixuur" is a lovely ballad that grows in intensity, then gives away in a perfect release of tension. It's an uplifting ending to a beautiful dream-world that shimmers as warm and bright as the title.