Whoever said, “Sequels are never as good as the first part”, clearly hasn’t listened to this album.
With an album name like this one, you could be forgiven for thinking that “Stream of Consciousness Vol.2” is going to be some sort of pretentious prog. rock production and/or Spinal Tap tribute, replete with 15-minute drum solos cranked up to 11 and extended ‘poetical’ lyrics dreamed up after way too much substance abuse. In fact, you wouldn’t be more wrong because four years after “Stream of Consciousness” saw the light of day, Norwegian americana artist Olav Larsen’s “Stream of Consciousness Vol.2” is actually once again a series of hugely powerful, mainly introspective and tautly constructed ballads, blessed with deep modern country-folk roots but plenty of other influences making themselves felt, too.
For an added sense of continuity, given there’s been a fair gap between the two albums coming out, it helps that Larsen has once again used his regular band, the Alabama Rodeo Stars, for some typically polished, razor-sharp backing and that the first song on “Stream of Consciousness Vol.2“, ‘When the past presents the future’, was originally intended to be the last on the 2021 album. However, it seems like Larsen has wanted to avoid any accusations of simply repeating the format he used four years ago, essentially a series of duets between Larsen and a series of female vocalists, which received a glowing review by colleague Pete Tomkins for AUK here. Rather, in “Stream of Consciousness Vol.2”, Larsen opts to move in a new – and it turns out equally attractive – direction altogether.
“Stream of Consciousness Vol.2” has much less of the delicate poise and tendency for understatement of much of the material on the 2021 album, instead shifting up a couple of gears in pace to more driving, animated melodies and an impassioned, full-on vocal delivery, mostly provided by Larsen. So if the original volume was something could put on in the background at some kind of sleepy family gathering, the middle-paced beats that predominate on “Stream of Consciousness Vol.2” make it much more relentlessly attention-grabbing, gripping stuff, considerably helped by very clear, simple titles and choruses – ‘I miss you’, ‘I don’t care’, ‘You’re not the same’ – that don’t stray too far from the world of personal relationships and outlooks on life. Unusually for americana, the music drives the fairly simple (but not simplistic) lyrics, not the other way round, and for a genre that normally relies heavily on particular locations and settings like the bar, the open road, the late-night motel and so on, these are almost completely absent. Most of the time (and it’s oddly liberating), you could be literally anywhere.
Perhaps in keeping with that, rather than focus on specifics, often Larsen opts for some universal home truths about relationships and messing them up by just telling it how it is, like on the very striking ‘I miss you’:
“I don’t really care about you
At least that’s what I told you
The truth is that I’m broken-hearted
Confused and astray
I wish that I could travel back
And change what I did wrong
I miss you, I miss you,
I miss you so much.”
Not being tied to a particular place works very well in songs like ‘Dreamer’, too, where the connections with reality are deliberately loosened, and Larsen starts each new verse with the last word of the previous one – “Pain”, “Peace”, “Time” – and gains fresh momentum for what is essentially a homage to hopes for a better future. Finally, the word starting the last verse, “Dreams”, brings him back to the opening verse, rounding off the song where it began.
Then, in one of the few songs that does rely on a sense of place, ‘Finding Myself’, the contrast is a dramatic one, particularly when Larsen lets rip with a real deep dive inside the brittleness and paradoxes of modern existence and self-doubt:
“I met myself tonight
At the local music bar
I caught my own reflection
In the restroom
I see myself in the mirror
But I don’t know who I am
I’ve been travelling far away
To get closer to myself
It was never supposed
To be easy, I know
But I never thought
It would be this hard
And the harder it gets
The easier it’s to forget
What the hell I’m
Trying to escape.”
Oddly enough, given how cohesive, punchy and engaging the previous eight songs have been, the last track, ‘Where have all the Protest Singers gone?’ feels a bit out of keeping with the rest of the album. Behind its quirky humour, there’s an important message criticising the apathy and disinterest that undermines a lot of political idealism these days. But as a way of closing out an album with so many intriguing personal angles to it, there’s a big clash of content and styles that its vaudevillesque country sound doesn’t really help get over the line.
Overall, though, “Stream of Consciousness Vol. 2″ is a high-powered, robust and enjoyable listen. When you add in the considerable contributions by some nailed-on violin, harmonica, piano and guitar solos as well as some choral vocals, almost without realising it, the album lifts off into some wonderfully cosmic moments. There’s the end of ‘I don’t care’ for example, a slow-paced rocker which has started off with a classic single bassline intro and which expands and expands into a rampaging stadium anthem, completely with thunderous heavenly choir and a solo violin hammering away over the rest of the band playing at full tilt. More than a stream of consciousness, then, at points like these, “Stream of Consciousness Vol.2” feels like a triumphant torrent of sound, life and happy musical energy – the kind of which, as a listener, you know you can never have enough.
