Review Melissa Nastasi 5 out of 5 stars

Songstress Anette Norgaard is a breath of fresh air and a welcome surprise within the music world. Recently releasing her new album, A North Node, Norgaard embraces Scandinavian roots alongside her knack for writing gorgeous folk laced pop-rock songs. The combination of these elements is unique to say the least, and Norgaard certainly pulls them off flawlessly. The ten tracks build a beautiful record that will have you anticipating every note from start to finish. At first listen, I was instantly captivated by A North Node, and my curiosity for what was coming up next, grew with every song.

Starting off the record is the track titled “Go North,” which will immediately draw listeners in with a bright yet haunting piano. Norgaard’s sultry vocals came into the forefront of the song, and are brought together with a strong male harmony as well as a beautiful violin that helps paint the picture for the song and lyrics. Following up is “Did They,” which is a strong piece on the record. Beginning with gently picked guitars, a subtle electric tone enters and plays alongside Norgaard’s voice and soft ‘ooo’ sounds that will certainly send shivers down your spine. As her voice grows stronger, it evokes such emotion as every note she belts out seems to be effortless.

"Saerlig Magi" is up next, which once again features Norgaard’s stunning vocals in the forefront. Precious strings are blended with an electric piano, as Anette’s lyrics tell an enchanting story, taking the listener on a musical journey they will not soon forget.  This piece is a tearjeaker for sure. “Sometimes,” enters with a harmonica sound, and immediately comes to life with lovely female vocals that harmonize perfectly with Norgaard’s. The combination of finger snaps and drums work together without flaw, helping to bring this wonderful song to life. This song quickly became a personal favorite on the record.

“It’s Actually Worse,” comes into play with a bright and vibrant piano that is perfect from the very beginning. Shortly into the piece, Norgaard carries in her brilliant vocals yet again, flooring you time after time. Her lyrics are both inspirational as well as soothing. It's the perfect sound for a rainy day. “If You Lay Down Your Heart,” brings a softer aspect into the record. Subtle strings are laced with Anette’s silky singing, as drums slightly enter as her voice becomes more boisterous. “Fall,” provides a different aspect of A North Node, with more of a soft rock feel in the piece. The lounge sounding piece is brought to life with intricate drums and lively backing vocals which help pull the song together. “A Promise,” provides an exquisite vocal performance by Norgaard, as it is the most heartfelt and tear jerking song on the album. It is impossible to get through this song without shedding a tear.

“We Walk On,” waltzes in with the same warm piano sound that carries through most of the record. The song seems like it would translate well onto any stage, big or small, as it breathes such life. Closing out the record is "Morgenstund," which is a blissful way to go out. Anette’s voice gives one last gasp of air which will leave you craving more of her beautiful lyrics and melody. This proves the only bad thing about this record, is the fact that it has to come to an end.

Anette’s Norgaard’s A North Node, is a wonderful collection of songs that will definitely help put her on the radar of music fans and critics alike. Her special knack for writing songs and executing them flawlessly proves to be a special gift indeed. Be sure to keep an ear out for Anette Norgaard. You will be ecstatic that you did.

Anette Norgaard

A North Node

By Melissa Nastasi

5 out of 5 Stars

Review Matthew Forss (5 out of 5 stars)

Originally from Denmark, Anette Norgaard is a talented singer, actress, teacher, and musician living in New York, USA.  A North Node is a ten-track wonderment steeped in clear vocals and arrangements from a Scandinavian influence.  Anette is joined by Danielle Enrico on piano, Elyssa Samsel on violin, Tony Conniff on bass, Charlie Demos on percussion/backing vocals, and Ari Sadowitz/Ramez Baddour on guitars.

“Did They” opens with a slow, acoustic/electric guitar introduction and Anette’s folk/pop vocals. The lilting guitar melody ripples with delicate elegance and musical brilliance.  After a few chords, the vocals are more akin to a rock song, but the guitar’s sound and tempo remains unchanged.  No additional instrumentation or vocals are included.  This is edgy folk/pop at its best.

“Fall” begins with light, swishy percussion and Anette’s golden voice.  The jazzy percussion set-up, light bass, and backup vocals adequately accompany Anette’s vocals here.  There are some keyboard atmospherics, too.  For the most part, the song takes on a jazzy side of laid-back, but Anette’s vocals brighten the tune up a bit.  Without the presence of a guitar, the song meanders along in a successful voyage of down-tempo, lounge, and avant-garde subtleties.

“If You Lay Down Your Heart” begins with a wavering violin and Anette’s crystal-clear voice. The vocals and violin are accompanied by a soft piano melody that adds a comforting quality to the song.  The latter half of the song contains louder vocals, but the instrumentation also follows in suit.  There is an element of Scandinavian or Celtic folk music throughout the tune.  At any rate, Anette succeeds with brilliant results.

“Morgenstund” begins with a few lower register keys on piano and some eerie atmospherics with swishy percussion and Anette’s beautiful voice.  This tune is sung in Danish.  The musical arrangements are more abstract than all of the other tracks on the album, but that does not make it a bad song.  The shimmering, atmospheric sounds and noises are angelic, industrial, and experimental, but the piano melody and Anette’s voice keeps everything well-rooted in reality. Overall, the song is very haunting, but delectable in all of its aural beauty.

“Sometimes” opens with a horn-like sound and Anette’s pop-focused vocals.  The percussion set-up and harmonica-like sounds add to the pop-centric song constructions.  The cascading sounds are varied, but flow together.  The cymbals, drums, snaps and claps make the song pop with contemporary qualities.  The frolicking bass-line and Anette’s vocals make this one of the most exciting songs on the album.

“It’s Actually Worse” begins with a slow, piano melody and Anette’s jazz-standard vocals.  The song is simply a vocal piano song without additional instrumentation or vocals.  The vocals are not forced or contrived.  The sweet vocals and soft melody make a fitting soundtrack for a lounge club or anyone interested in love songs.

Anette Norgaard produces a fine album of ten songs than span the gamut from fun and lively to emotive and reflective.  The songs contain a few horn/harmonica-like sounds, as well as guitar, bass, keyboards, piano, and assorted percussion.  The diversity in “Morgenstund” is an example of pushing beyond one’s boundaries in the creative process of musicianship with all of the avant-garde undertones.  The piano adds a reflective tone to many of the songs, while the guitar leads “Sometimes” into a beautiful oblivion of catchiness.  There are similarities with other Scandinavian female singers here, which is not a bad thing.  A North Node is a thing of beauty that will be appreciated by everyone that listens to it.

Artist: Anette Norgaard

Album: A North Node

Review by Matthew Forss

Rating: 5 Stars (out of 5)

Review by Alec Cunningham (4 out of 5 stars)

The first thing you’re likely to notice about musician Anette Norgaard’s sound is that she carries a soft lightness in her voice that will immediately remind you of Jewel. She uses her vocals as a powerful vehicle to deliver her ideas and emotions to her listeners in a way that can’t easily be ignored. Her first album consists of 10 tracks of entirely unique, self-written content. As for the album title, A North Node, points toward a nickname she was given because of her last name and her Scandinavian heritage.

Although a handful of musicians contribute to the album’s instrumentation and backing vocals, only one musician contributes his vocals in a powerful way that could make the track be considered a duet between the two. This backing, provided by Søren Bech Madsen, takes place in the first track, called “I Go North.” Madsen’s deep vocals work well in contrast with Norgaard’s elegant voice. They are able to create such a complementary sound together that it makes you wonder what the two could accomplish working as a duo on an entire release.

It was not until the age of 34 that Norgaard first began writing her own music. Before that, she discovered her vocal talents at an early age and began perfecting her talents through schooling but was diagnosed with a polyp on her vocal folds at 26. After her surgery, she began retraining her vocals and opened her own theater company and wrote and performed her own solo musical piece at 30. Some of these songs even suggest that Norgaard has some type of background in theater. You can imagine tracks like “It’s Actually Worse” and “A Promise” being sung and acted out under a sole light on a dark theater stage.

There are soft, delicate tracks such as “If You Lay Down Your Heart,” where not much more than a piano and violin pave the way for her vocals. Likewise, there are not any songs that would necessarily be labeled as lively tracks, but if there was one that could be considered a little more upbeat than the rest it would be the hopeful track “We Walk On.” This song also happens to be her first single off of this new release. Norgaard makes it clear through her work that she pays a specific mindfulness to her craft. You can tell this especially well in “A Promise,” a heartrending song about someone passing away. She sings, “I give her a promise to always be true to the faith inside of me, and she drifts off to a heavenly door.” It’s songs like these and the words within them that make you want to believe in her work almost as much as she believes in it herself.

Before this, she released an album in 2009 titled Dramatically Different that featured musician and producer Charlie Demos. This new release also features Demos, who worked to produce Norgaard’s album as well as contributed percussion and backing vocals.

Since she holds her Scandinavian ancestry so close to her it is only natural that Norgaard might include a track that is sung in another language. She includes not one but two of these tracks, the first of which is “Saerlig Magi” and the second of which is “Morgenstund,” which ends the release.

This is an album with relatively simple tracks that are backed by a minimum amount of instrumentation. Some of this release’s most notable points include “It’s Actually Worse,” “Fall,” and “A Promise.” If you happen to even find yourself in the mood to listen to soothing music with passionate lyrics, A North Node should be one of the first tracks you turn to.

Artist: Anette Norgaard
Album: A North Node
Review by Alec Cunningham
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Review by Justin Kreitzer (3.5 out of 5 Stars)

The road to singer-songwriter and actress Anette Norgaard’s debut album, A North Node, was a long and rough one to say the least.  The folk-pop chanteuse was born and raised on a small island in Denmark where her passion for music was stoked by singing in her church choir.  Later, she landed in London where she attended musical theater school but sadly, developed a vocal polyp and was faced with the devastating news that she may not be able to continue singing.  She soldiered on though and moved to New York and attended acting school as her voice eventually returned to strength.  Since then she co-founded a theater company where she works as a vocal training coach.  Renewed, Norgaard sings from her heart and brings that well-travelled experience and the strength and courage from her health scare to her long-awaited debut album which she self-released in March via her Bandcamp page.  Her gorgeous well-trained voice is inviting and powerful and is the perfect vessel for her unique Scandinavian-influenced brand of jazz-inflected and pop-informed folk rock sound.  Anette sings and plays piano on the album which was produced by queer-pop icon Charlie Demos and recorded and mixed by Tony Conniff in New York and features a host of guest musicians like violinist Elyssa Samsel and guitarists Ramez Baddour, Ari Sadowitz and Christian Totland.                

Opening the album is the statement-making “I Go North”, a duet featuring guest vocals from Søren Bech Madsen, whose rich and theatrical voice complements Anette’s perfectly and together recalls the pretty, organic folk of the Swell Season and the Once soundtrack.  The song also features the album’s fullest arrangement with stirring strings, twinkling piano and hushed acoustic guitars.  Slightly more subtle, “Did They” follows with hypnotic cyclical guitars that grow in intensity along with Norgaard as she coos and accuses with her politically-aware lyrical themes and bittersweet melodies.  The breathtakingly gorgeous “Særlig Magi” is sung in her native Scandinavian language alongside pirouetting violins and liquid electric piano notes that give the song a floating atmospheric ambiance.  Next, the more upbeat “Sometimes” features plush layers of background vocals and whimsical melodies along with snapping percussion and gently strummed acoustic guitars for a nostalgia-inducing sound that recalls 90’s alt-folk stars like Sarah McLachlan.    

“It’s Actually Worse”, a heart-aching slow-waltzing ballad with its universally relatable lyrical theme, stair-stepping piano riff and an emotionally-charged vocal performance offers up a standout moment.  Cut from the same cloth, “If You Lay Down Your Heart” is built upon an understated yet powerful arrangement of piano and searing strings with an uplifting vocal performance that matches the music’s intensity.  Another standout track, “Fall” makes sure Norgaard’s voice is placed squarely in the spotlight as it is nearly performed a cappella with only indelible background vocals, an upbeat shuffling drum beat and some faint organ rounding out the sparse arrangement.  “A Promise” just oozes a jazzy grandeur with a smoky vocal that soars past the rafters.  The moody piano-led “We Walk On” features swells of background vocals from Charlie Demos and showcases Norgaard’s passionate and lilting, Tori Amos-like vocal phrasing for yet another standout moment.  The stunningly beautiful “Morgenstund” is the perfect closing track with its chiming percussion and Danielle Enrico’s guest piano playing and it is sure to leave a lasting reminder of Norgaard’s triumphant and powerful voice long after the CD has stopped spinning in the player. 

With her supreme and soaring voice at the forefront, Anette Norgaard’s long-awaited debut album, A North Node, rises above the over-crowded music scene just like she rose above her own challenges to make the album.                 

Artist: Anette Norgaard
Album: A North Node
Reviewed by: Justin Kreitzer
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Stars

Review by Alice Neiley (4 out 5 stars

Anette Norgaard’s North is born of harsh weather and the warmth one has to have inside in order to brave it, a perfect balance of melancholy and hope for the transition out of a long winter.  The album is infused with ballads, and though only a few tracks depart from that style, this Scandinavian artist’s solo debut is anything but monotonous.  Every slow heartbreak is haunting, every up-tempo heartbeat, however infrequent, opens a new musical door and we can breathe fresh air. 

“I Go North” opens the album with eerie guitar, light piano, and a touch of violin, setting a dark, wanderlust tone to the whole compilation.  With the entrance of Norgaard’s strong vocals, the track only increases in richness—her lengthy notes seem to stretch themselves like branches over the slightly more complex movement of snare drum, piano, and snare drum.  The gorgeous strings are consistent in the background as well, but come forward at lyrical points of change—“wind is strong,” “far away from here,”  “feeling I can never go back”—as if to wake us up.  The fact that the first few notes travel up the scale on the lyrics “I go north,” is also clever, right away cementing the idea of going somewhere, even within the musical progression.  Søren Bech Madsen’s vocal presence on this track is stunning, both in harmony with Norgaard and his solo phrases.  However, his voice does register as much louder than Norgaard’s, especially at first, which introduces a mixing issue that resurfaces throughout the album, both with the balance of vocals to vocals and instruments to vocals. 

In “Did They,” for example, the lonely sound of only guitar and vocals combined with somewhat cryptic lyrics, “did they flood your heart with love and praises/did you think that it could never get worse” is magnetic, but the volume and timbre of Norgaard’s voice feels abrasive against the spare background.  On the other hand, this rough-around- the edges mixing/balance style makes the album sound rustic, much like the cultural roots of Norgaard herself.  Rustic, which is, in a nutshell, exactly the texture of the next track “Saerlig Magi,” with its crackly beginning, like an LP, as well as foreign language, sets the piece immediately in a different time and place.   In this case, the balance seems to work well because the thick layers of piano and violin support the powerful vocals and give Norgaard space for the natural cry in her voice to soar without sticking out as strained. 

Throughout the remaining tracks, at least the ballads—“It’s Actually Worse,” “If You Lay Down Your Heart,” “A Promise,” “We Walk On,” “Morgenstund”—vocals alternate between a softer, high register, and a rather forced, dramatic sound.  Solo violin brings in “If You Lay Down Your Heart,” a stunning piece with what I imagine to be the sounds of Norgaard’s Denmark home sprinkled into the chord progression.  For a while, soft, high vocals and violin proceed alone, then, piano enters to fill out the background.  The vocals soon move into mid-register, still melancholy and subdued beside the extremely focused tone of violin, but by the time the drums enter, the vocals push against the instrumentation, and, somewhat strained, are a little pitchy on the higher notes.  Though this shift in color is mostly supported by the underlay of strong piano chords, violin, and drums, the vocal drama is unnecessary (if it is, in fact, intentional), because the melodic development of the song carries it forward in a more than interesting enough way. 

Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote, Do not go gentle into that good night/rage rage against the dying of the light, which seems to also be one of Anette Norgaard’s pleas as North presses toward its final track.  The most interesting pieces on the album, and probably by no coincidence the best produced, are the ones that bring about something different, something that sparks the attention among the darkness and beauty of ballads.   “Sometimes” and “Fall,” are the only tracks that arrive with a faster tempo, and  “We Walk On” and “Morgenstund,” stand out for their unique sound effects and increasing intensity, even as the album comes to its end—rage rage against the dying of the light. 

Because there’s no one listed as playing harmonica, accordion, or oboe in the liner notes, I have to assume the sound that opens “Sometimes,” which sounds like a cross between all those instruments, is electronically created.  Either way, it’s fabulous, and combined with the clapping/snapping sound that serves as percussion, introduces a beat and tone of playfulness which they lyrics later mirror in their irony “sometimes just sometimes your mine/say you’ll never be mine.”  High register backup vocals, perhaps dubbed tracks of Norgaard’s own voice add to the complexity along with snare drum for the chorus.  Her voice makes the most sense in this song, as well as “Fall”—the vocal backup builds excited harmony, and a variety of drum action gives Norgaard’s occasionally aggressive singing tendencies something to push against, something to redistribute the weight. 

The album comes to a close with “Morgenstund,” preceded by “We Walk On,” and as Dylan Thomas suggests, the journey doesn’t sound as if it will ever die.  Both of these ending tracks are driven by piano and vocals, but each include a sound, instrument, or melodic surprise that hasn’t yet been used in any other part of the album—tinkling bells and the rich backup vocals of Charlie Demos in “We Walk On,” the whistles, left to right hand atonal piano work, thunder sound effects, and vocal jumps in “Morganstund.”  Though there may be some issues to work through in terms of production for Anette Norgaard’s next project, the other inconsistencies on North seem to work in its favor.  The feeling of unresolved mystery that flows through the whole album implies that Norgaard might press forward forever into her own version of the light, one that is itself alive, undying, and getting stronger by the measure.

Artist: Anette Norgaard
Title: A North Node
Reviewed by Alice Neiley
Rating: 4 out of 5