God's Musicians

Keeping solidly to Scandinavia's reputation for gloom is the folk-rock band Garmarna, which mixes traditional Swedish acoustic instruments with electric guitars and the intermittant African drum. Garmarna vaires its attack from low-key telling of horrors to an amplied assault in songs that report of ghouls, trolls, werewolves, and other folkloric denizens of the northern European collective imagination. To its credit, the band maintains a non-ironic, matter-of-fact approach as if merely documenting local history rather than acting out melodramatic material that might even have disturbed the Brothers Grimm. Some surprisingly light and graceful moments arise from this deadpan perspective.