A Postcard From the Town That Blues Built in Norway

Notodden is where Norway's biggest blues festival happens every August, and it takes a certain kind of local pride to name your album Songs From Notodden Norway rather than something more universal — but Spoonful of Blues have earned the right. This is their sixth record, cut at the town's own Juke Joint Studio, and it sounds like a band that's spent years playing to that exact festival crowd and knows precisely what makes them move.

Jostein Forsberg's vocals and harmonica sit right up front throughout, with Morten Omlid's guitar doing the heavy lifting underneath — this is eleven original songs, no filler covers, which is more than I can say for a lot of regional blues records that lean on standards to pad the runtime. "Rollercoaster Ride To Hell" and "Mojo Mama" both have exactly the kind of shuffle that gets a festival tent moving at two in the afternoon.

I won't pretend this is a record trying to reinvent anything — it's not. What it does is exactly what a hometown blues band should do: play with total conviction for the people who already love them, and trust that conviction to carry it further than it has any right to.

Mine favorittspor: "Me In Your Arms Tonight" is the one I keep humming days later, and "Mojo Mama" is the one I'd put on a Notodden festival mixtape without a second thought.

Redaktørens dom: This won't be the record that introduces Notodden to the rest of the blues world, but for those of us who already know the town, it's exactly right — honest, unpretentious, and proudly local.