How Are You Going to Keep 'Em Down on the Fjord After They've Seen Montgomery?

This band’s name suggests something is a little out of place. Though there undoubtedly have been Norwegian cowboys (and probably still are), I wouldn’t go looking for someone named Olav Larsen at a rodeo. For that matter, Alabama wouldn’t be my first stop if I were looking for a rodeo, a sport with Wild West iconography rather than the Deep South. And not since O.B. McClinton asserted his Mississippi pride with 1973’s “O.B. from Senatobie” has a black man sought to carve a place for himself in country music by branding himself with a state so infamous for its massive resistance to integration.

So what are we to make of this country album from a Norwegian of African descent? When Larsen pays tribute to the old home-place in “My Town”, one immediately wonders, “what town?”  When Larsen sings,

I was born in this town
This town is my home
I grew up in this tow.
I was never alone
It was here that I first started dreaming
And it was here that I first fell in love
I want to die in this town

is he describing the same town—prototypically in the rural South—that so many country singers invoke to establish their authenticity? Is he a neighbor of Montgomery Gentry in the community they describe in their recent top-40 hit, also called “My Town”:

Where I was born, where I was raised
Where I keep all my yesterdays
Where I came back to settle down
It’s where they’ll put me in the ground
This is my town

To the ears of this American listener, the small town trope does not establish Larsen’s authenticity. Indeed, it does precisely the opposite. The Americana scattered across these Scandinavians’s album is anything but authentic.

The global vertigo this album produces would make it easy to dismiss as a cultural novelty (like Houston’s Cowboy Troy’s attempts to fuse hip-hop and country). But the music is faithful to country style—albeit more in the Burrito Brothers tradition than that of the Nashville machine—and, well, good. Larsen sings with a reedy crooning and languorous phrasing suffused with the spirit of Gram Parsons. The Alabama Rodeo Stars back Larsen with a clean and understated style that at times evokes Lyle Lovett’s arrangements. The album is particularly helped by Øyvind Berekvam’s tasteful pedal steel and Erland Åsland’s lead guitar. Åsland is less impressive when he switches to banjo, but his playing is perfectly competent.  The strongest songs on this album are the ones where the band gels around a steady beat.

Larsen, who wrote the albums 12 songs entirely in English, produces lyrics that are a tad underwhelming. Though to his credit, he largely avoids the temptation to mash together simple country clichés, with the exception of “My Town” and his attempt at a country gospel number, “Sweet Savior’s Arms.” His lyrics are capable but boring, and occasionally suffer from an awkward turn of phrase. (“The road may not lead you to the place you’ve dreamed of all your life / Sometimes the truth is harder, it may cut you like a knife / Was it because of her who was to become your wife.”)

But the weak lyrics can be largely overlooked because of his compelling delivery and captivating arrangements. There is one egregious misstep, however: The album’s second song, “Unhappy/Dreamer” inexplicably includes soprano saxophone, which trades solos with the pedal steel that could find a home in a nightmarish collaboration between Bela Fleck’s Flecktones and Kenny G. Larsen’s other attempt to incorporate wind instruments is much more interesting: “Sweet Savior’s Arms” fades out with a brass ensemble accompanied by a snare drum, like an old-world funeral march. While this breaks the album’s straight-up country tone, it suggests Larsen could plow his European perspective with interesting results.

Larsen’s African heritage adds a fascinating wrinkle to this album. If he were American, his race would likely win him attention because country still remains an almost all-white genre. But Olav Larsen and the Alabama Rodeo Stars have pursued their careers in Scandinavia and England, where the racial dynamics and connotations of country music are so different that it is impossible for me to speculate on its significance.

If their sound were pop enough for American country radio, this American release would be an interesting challenge to the racial and national boundaries of the Nashville establishment (Australians are the only non-North Americans who have successfully pursued US careers, to my knowledge.) But the Americana/alt.country scene to which Larsen’s American label is pitching Love’s Come to Town might learn interesting things, too. Americana and alt.country fans are also driven by a yearning for authenticity, one that fans believe country music has sacrificed for commercialism. What does it mean when the sounds associated with a nostalgia for America’s past are used convincingly by someone so far removed from it?