Progressive Rock
Karisma Records · 21 October 2026
“Sorgens kapittel” means the chapter of grief, and Karisma picked the date: 21 October would have been the fiftieth birthday of Stig Arve Kvam-Jørgensen, the band’s organist and singer, who died suddenly in 2025. They recruited him after watching him play Focus’s “Hocus Pocus”, and the wall of Hammond, the Fender Rhodes and the vintage synths he helped build are still the first thing anyone recognises about this band.
The record arrives in two shapes that don’t agree. The digital listing gives twelve tracks; the vinyl entry on Discogs gives four: “Sorgens Kapittel”, “Syndenes Magi Del 2”, “God På Dårlig Stemning” and “Siste Dans”. The short pieces in the middle, then, are movements rather than separate songs. The second of those four titles picks up the name of the album the band released on Apollon in 2017, and the lyrics are all in Norwegian: they deal with human fates, with grief and with the absurdities of daily life, and the label offers them as “exotic” to anyone who doesn’t speak it.
Among the twelve tracks there is a prog-death roar (“Satanisten”), a detour into funk-rock (“Nudisten”) and an acoustic, joking moment with Zappa nearby (“Lyset”); “Siste Dans” closes on the Mellotron.
That parade of costumes sits awkwardly inside the frame the band itself puts around the record: between “Avgrunnen Kaller” and “Siste Dans”, the two nine-minute pieces that carry the weight, there are ten tracks that make the elegy start over ten times. The raised-eyebrow humour has been house style for twenty years; on the album whose lyrics are about one particular death, it sits harder.
Jostein Smeby plays guitar and sings, Erik Paulsen plays bass and sings, Eskil Nyhus is on drums and Alessandro Elide on percussion: the band insists it has two drummers and that this gives them plenty to work with, on record and live. Nobody is credited on organ. Out on CD, on three coloured vinyl editions and on streaming.
Rating: 8.1/10
Text by Guillem Cardós