It’s Album Time

After a winking chorus welcomes you to the album (“it’s album time, it’s album time, it’s album time”) Terje cracks his knuckles and prances through the stately stroll of “Leisure Suit Preben.” The space age synths and harpsichord imply M giving a truck-full of gadgets to James Bond in one of his ‘70s flicks. The following “Preben Goes to Acapulco,” met one of Terje’s main criticisms head on. The Baltic music press often complained that Terje’s tunes were beach music, meant to be ignored with a margarita in hand. Terje took it as a compliment. “Preben Goes to Acapulco,” and the later “Strandbar,” are 100% beach music—and it’s fantastic. How can you make a song called “DeLorean Dynamite” without winking? They ascend to the heights of Righeira’s cheese-pop masterpiece “Vamos a la Playa,” songs that revel in their own insubstantialness.

That’s not to say Terje doesn’t show off some serious chops. “Preben Goes to Acapulco” has a fiery synth solo that flutters across all 88 keys, climaxing twice, including a triumphant final salvo joined by a full orchestra of strings soaring away in the background. That goes doubly for the frenetic jaunt “Alfonso Muskedunder” (great fucking pen name), a 7/8 jam that erupts into two separate solos; one from Terje on a keytar and the other from his brother, Olaf Olsen, whose drums give an empathetic clattering to every song on the album. But on “Alfonso” he goes full Neil Peart, absolutely bashing his poor kit to bits during an extended breakdown that evolves into a chorus of cherubic vocals and shimmering strings rising to the stratosphere.

This does point to the sneaky classical influences infiltrating these fine pieces of cheese. Terje loves him some harpsichords. His genius was in realizing the finest moments in baroque music have a lot in common with disco and prog. Please see “Swing Star” both parts 1 and 2, the first rushing over a stary synth run that races like Steve Roach on an IV drip of red bull. “2” has a longer, loungier build, all squelchy horns and a fuzzed-out bass, but the background details; slippy pianos and unidentifiable arpeggios encased in gossamer would gobsmack Hayden. The following “Oh Joy” is even more of a maximalist romp. Terje indulges his not so inner Vangelis, imagining how he would score the Olympics. The build is so flawless, it evokes Cape Canaveral counting down to blast off and the final few moments do pulse like a rocketship breaking out of orbit.  Psuedo-acapella “Svensk Sas,” blurs the line between man and machine, but the only ethical questions are if the robots or the flesh are having more fun. The vocaloid singers and human hummers join in blissful harmony to make the 21st century’s answer to Muppets’ classic “Mah Nà Mah Nà.”

In fact, if there’s one influence to consider above the rest, it’s Italian master Piero Umiliani. The composer was the mad man behind “Mah Nà Mah Nà,” but also a slew of itali-disco films and his own private experiments that leaned to the truly mindwarping. Terje never delves into the insane outsider angle that Umiliani did, but they both revel in balancing the knife’s edge between beauty and bluster. Umiliani’s “Nostalgia” series seemed to be ironic but took the façade off by indulging in uncompressed gorgeousness. Terje does the same with the emotional climax of It’s Album Time, “Johnny & Mary,” featuring Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. They slow the Robert Palmer original down to a sigh, Ferry’s old luxury splayed like he’s singing from his velvet deathbed. Terje pulls out one of the oldest tricks in the pop songbook; repeating the main melody on his piano as a bridge, but the gravitas given by Ferry and the Grand makes it an astonishing emotional blow in an album that’s mostly blowing raspberries. 

As fellow critic Peter Helman pointed out in his piece for this album, we do have to stop, take a breath, and collect our thoughts before we talk about it. The song. “Inspector Norse.” An album full of wall to wall bangers, and Terje is still able to hide perfection at the end. A famed rateyourmusic review of the song claimed that the central “doot doot doot doot” melody was here before the dinosaurs, an inevitable collection of notes ingrained, not just upon the human consciousness, but tattooed across reality itself. There is an inescapable, ineffable catchiness to “Inspector Norse” that defies all logic and laws of physics. The swirling disco breakdown in the song’s second half leads to a simple, but utterly perfect, octave jump that serves as the 2010’s single most ebullient moment. It’s “Staying Alive,” it’s “Good Times,” it’s “One More Time,” it is the moon, the stars, the sun at least for those scant few minutes of unparalleled bliss.

And then, he vanished. Terje is still around, DJing, remixing, touring (very occasionally), but It’s Album Time was meticulous craft disguised as a lark. Like the timing of a perfect joke, it had no follow up. If this is the last will and testament of the finest comedian of our time, I’m ok with that. It was Album Time. Sorry. Album Time!