Scandinavian Rebekka Karijord started out making music for movies, and it shows. With her second album, We Become Ourselves, the vastly experienced musician and composer seems committed to painting pictures with the sounds she creates on her computer and beyond, offering up a collection of tracks that is highly sensory and uniquely visceral.
Whether she is punctuating the air with a careful, crisply articulated acapella lyric or howling carnally against a tribal beat, Karijord’s songs are nothing if not evocative. Each track is dramatic enough to provide the background to any film, yet they all still manage to feel organic — perhaps a testament to the fact that the album was recorded live over 8 days in December 2011. Tending to swell and shrink in the most natural of ways, the sounds Karijord creates really do paint pictures in the mind’s eye. “We Become Ourselves” draws up images of a kind of serene woodland setting, full of fairies and nymphs, while “Use My Body While It’s Still Young” sets up a scene as carnal and vivid as its name.
Though Karijord’s style is reminiscent of her more mainstream counterparts like Florence + The Machine, the visuality of her music is a characteristic all her own. The record is a demonstration of a remarkable talent that Karijord obviously possesses. With We Become Ourselves, she has accomplished the seemingly impossible — capturing something as intangible as feeling in a way that is truly representative. It is a feat most musicians aspire to achieve, but few ever actually do. The effect is like the best kind of 2-for-1 deal in that the music, which itself is beautiful in its powerful and haunting quality, leads to something even greater if you let it. With We Become Ourselves, listening goes from being a passive exercise to an active and creative one in its own right.
