Tavastia, Helsinki, Finland5th March 2020
Eivør & Peura
Eivør Pálsdóttir, performing as EIVØR, is a Faroese singer-songwriter with a trade-mark of singing Faroese ballad-rooted songs, well, in Faroese. In her current European tour, spanning as far as Istanbul, she visited Helsinki for a warm, very atmospheric evening.
Peura
According to self-description, “PEURA is the solo project of Sonja Pennanen, a Dream-Pop singer-songwriter from Helsinki, Finland. Her music is a form of honest self-exploration with a melancholic yet hopeful tone.” Her recent album ‘Failure’ was released in autumn 2019 and she has supported EIVØR in the Finnish legs of the tour. http://dearpeura.com / https://www.facebook.com/dearpeura
Music & Performance
PEURA seems to be a decent warm-up choice for EIVØR. Sporting a see-through lightweight cape on top of shorts and a top, and therefore shining in the spotlights - literally - PEURA delivered several dreamy songs during the first half-hour of the gig. While sounding pleasant, having the full set of melancholy-inspired material made me wish for a more energetic pieces.
Setlist
01. Boat
02. The Art of Dying
03. Breathe In
04. Jealousy
05. Rooftops
06. Funeral
07. Time
Rating
Music: 6
Performance: 6
Light: 5
Sound: 8
Total: 6 / 10
Eivør
The musical career of EIVØR is lasting about 20 years. She is known for singing her ballads in Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and English. Her latest album was released in 2017, but this does not hold her back from bunch of appearances in 2020: days after Helsinki she already played Istanbul, with shows in Norway and Germany are due. https://www.eivor.com
Music & Performance
EIVØR put a double-test to the Helsinki crowd: how many people are aware of her existence and how many of those are ready to sacrifice a well-deserved Thursday night rest for a gig that starts at 22.00? It is not very customary in the Finnish capital to have late gigs on weekdays - most people should wake up early to go to work, and this fact does not play well with late starts, so early gigs are more customary. What can I say? The club wasn’t sold out, but it was reliably packed, so these tests were passed with confidence. The audience was quite diverse in age.
When you see the EIVØR’s stage, before the gig, you take note of the plethora of instruments that accompany her - electric guitar, ukulele, and a shamanic-looking tambourine. when your eyes go further on stage, you notice plenty of very advanced synths. A Prophet 12 (digital-analog synth), a Kronos workstation, Dominion 1 Analogue synth, vocoder VC340 - this tells us that EIVØR’s sound is not just a mere accompaniment done with classic instruments, but it is made with great attention and craft, and what you hear is lives up to the excellent, immersive atmosphere. When I describe her voice, the one word is: powerful. She effortlessly delivers complicated yet melodic songs that feature lots of energy.
The gig itself is well balanced when more ballad-is songs are interleaved with more energetic, tambourine-driven “shamanic” experiences. In fact, first tambourine song, ‘Salt’, ended in a drumstick broken against the instrument. In the gig, EIVØR presented four new and unreleased songs, so perhaps we can hope for another record coming soon. After a by-definition = melancholic experience of the warm-up, one certainly not falls asleep at the main set. Those lucky to be in the front rows (kudos to my colleague holding a place for me!) would experience also immersive lights, that shine in the audience and make the whole sound coming, like, from a smoky, brightly lit cloud. I also could say that the records, in this case, do not live to the experience of a live gig, which is quite often the case with ethnic-related music.
The gig lasted for about an hour and twenty minutes and was a very good spirit-lifting experience.
Setlist
01. Verð Mín
02. Silvitni
03. Salt
04. Boxes
05. Hands (Unreleased)
06. Bridges
07. Gullspunning (Unreleased)
08. Stirdur Saknur (Unreleased)
09. Tides
10. True Love
11. Patience (Unreleased)
12. Í Tokuni
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13. Trøllabundin
14. Falling Free
Rating
Music: 10
Performance: 8
Light: 8
Sound: 9
Total: 9 / 10
All pictures by Askar Ibragimov
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