Finishing up Carita Holmström with Aquamarin (1984), Time of Growing (1990)

We abandoned her discography after the year 1980 quite some time ago (could it really be 4.5 years!) with the disappointingly two-faced album Two Faces.  We shouldn't have, because there were more beautiful surprises to come.  I know throughout the blog I've mentioned her name many times as one of the most outstanding discoveries in the female SSW sphere, like a Finnish Carole King, with the welcome addition of some very progressive or inventive aspects here and there and that typical Scandinavian spirit of melancholy that blows like a January wind throughout, so the mistake is all mine.  Despite the Olivia Newton John-like cover of the 1984 Aquamarin straightaway the opener just blew me away, being, despite the slight deviance into 80s production, as good in composition as anything from the first magical album:





Jag ar hel = I am whole (?)

And the whole LP continues in the same vein, distinctly superior to its 1980 predecessor, surprisingly, despite this being the iconic year of George Orwell and Duran Duran.   As a whole it seems more mature, less childishly naive than the first album.

Moving forward into 1990 one cannot expect miracles from the music industry.  And indeed this album hits its nadir on the beginning of side b with 4 cover versions of Gershwin tracks, the most stupidly insipid ones like Fascinating Rhythm, a song so unfascinating to me I would gladly buy the sheet music just to use for toilet paper-- showing the odd bipolar tendency that was a hallmark of every Carita album since 1980, but then, surprise, the brilliant composer returns with a chamber suite called Tällainen Olen Maailmani in four parts, lasting less than 13 minutes, but heavenly for us to hear:





It's outrageous that in the year 1990 such music would have been produced with a hope to being heard!!  When I think back to that time I remember hair metal and Guns and Roses, the facile soul of Whitney Houston and idiocy of Celine...

Here's another part of the suite that sounds very much extracted from an opera she composed, building so much in its intensity with unusual chord structures I was utterly in shock:





The first side of this 1990 work is not at all disappointing either, despite what I had been led to believe by the release year.

So thank you, thank you Carita, for this.

Note that she continued with a couple more albums, and you can hear samples on discogs.  If I have some extra money in paypal I might try to buy those too, though I'm expecting bitter disappointment finally.