The Chronicles Of Father Robin – The Songs & Tales Of Airoea Book 3: Magical Chronicle (Ascension) Review

[Cover art by Lars Bigum Kvernberg]

This is the third and final installment of our review of The Songs & Tales of Airoea, a trilogy released by the band, The Chronicles of Father Robin. Below is the introduction to the trilogy, originally published with the review of the first record in September, and this album’s review follows. Click here for our review of the second album.

Most of us must have core memories of grand plans we made with our best buds in school. To grow up and all be cops or robbers or sports stars or spies or treasure hunters. Or to all be so rich and travel the world together or live in some exotic place on a mountain with pet lions and private rockets and a summer home on Mars. Or to be famous actors on a TV show together. Or to be in a rock and roll band. And most of us realized exactly zero of those inspired visions. That’s no knock on any of us. We’re human, after all, and were children then. Fickle. Fallible. Feckless, some of us. But it is a pretty strong reminder that when people do realize a childhood dream, especially together with the kids who shared that dream, it is special indeed.

In the early 1990s, a group of childhood pals in Norway founded a prog rock band called Fangorn in high school. They emulated the greats of the 70s but also modern luminaries of Scandinavian prog rock. They jammed together and drew inspiration not only from predictable sources suggested by the band name, but also from their lives together, and they developed a conceptual framework for what would become The Chronicles of Father Robin about a mythological creature who “embodied all the members of the band into one being,” and included original world building around the fantasy realm of Airoea.

Years would pass and each of the friends would go on to achieve renown as members of Wobbler, Tusmørke, The Samuel Jackson Five, and Jordsjø, all of which are familiar by now to anybody who has a passing familiarity with Scandinavian progressive rock. But they never lost sight of their dream and now, thirty years later, The Chronicles of Father Robin, at this point constituting a legit prog supergroup, has been fully realized via a triple concept album called The Songs & Tales of Airoea, released first as a boxset and then as individual albums to follow. Achieving full integration with the project’s mythos, the amazing artwork of Lars Bigum Kvernberg, commissioned exclusively for this project, adorns each album to include covers, sleeves, lyric sheets and booklets, and gorgeously rendered maps of mythical Airoea.

Thus far in The Songs & Tales of Airoea, Books 1 and 2 have taken the listener on a wonderful journey across two fantastical biomes, first earth then water, all of it familiar enough to denizens of the modern world and yet magical and mysterious in the details, the story of Father Robin and his discovery of the origins of Airoea and all its amazing places and creatures. The thoroughness with which The Chronicles have realized The Tales has been evident from the beginning, from the intriguing cover art through bold yet deferential progressive rock to the beguiling story that ties it all together. Special care has been taken to align the feel of the music with the art and its underlying story, with grand instrumentation and musical spectacle adorning nearly all of Book 1, while Book 2 embraced a comparatively sparser musicality in conveying a more nebulous tale, especially Father Robin’s dreamt experiences and his underwater journey, and then coalescing with the full band again for his adventures on and above the water until the story takes the listener right up to the edge of their seat to close Book 2.

Release date: February 23rd, 2024. Label: Karisma Records

The cover art for Book 3: Magical Chronicle (Ascension) takes the listener to the skies, shifting the color palette again, this time to the golden hues of sunset over and behind a range of empyrean blues. In the opening song, the titular magical chronicle is said to contain “…writings / that tell the tale of everything,” which are relayed musically here in turns of quiet mystery and buoyant glory, once again reflecting a quality of songwriting wherein the intersections of music, art, and lyrics greatly enhance the overall experience. This is particularly exemplified in “Skyslumber” to close Side 1 and “Cloudship” to open Side 2 as they tell the story of Father Robin’s movement up and through the clouds and sky. The energy here is understated, reminiscent of The Yes Album in the interplay of harmonized vocals and narrative guitar, a gentle embracing energy of the skies and the clouds and sun, of the heavens. The atmosphere of Book 3 and especially in this stretch is fantastically comfy and warm, embracing, and the melodies are wonderful, as expected. But, even filled with terrific ideas, Book 3 rarely feels full of them; rather, overall, this final chapter wants for the richness of the preceding books. It isn’t quite obvious at first but the relative thinness here is probably down to the strange absence of nearly all of the complementary players (and their attendant energy) present earlier on, a problem nearly but not quite rectified on Side 2.

After the first two parts of the trilogy, it may seem strange to be discussing Side 2 so soon and that’s a function of this album’s relatively short runtime of 34 minutes. A shorter album only presents a problem when it’s given the listener something that is of high quality but in such low quantity that it just can’t fully satisfy and that, unfortunately, is the case here. And Side 2’s second track exacerbates the problem at the level of the song. As “Empress of the Sun” explodes from the haze, it imbues the air with bright electric light, strange and incongruous in its reticular passage across the skies, its sounds echoing those of the psychedelic rock on the cusp of prog rock’s dawn. It’s a beautifully strong energy now, growing out of an exciting element of the story, strummed guitars and emphatic vocals ascending and descending like sunlit cirrus clouds amidst winding vapors in the upper sky, dancing, diving, darting atop a billowing foundation generated by the bass and percussion.

“Empress of the Sun” is such a terrific song that it’s seriously undermined by its brief runtime of just under five minutes, especially in light of its abrupt ending after just one more chorus following a fantastic organ break. “Empress” could easily support another three to four minutes and maybe even several more. Indeed, it seems to have been built to do just that and then was just left unfinished.

After a bright and bouncy couple of minutes to sing the praises of the Moon Princess, an insistently rolling bassline runs through proper closer, “Lost in the Palace Gardens,” alongside organ and percussion and a beautiful ringing solo. Against wide-ranging and dynamic vocal melody, a juxtaposition is created of arrival and culmination, revelation and confusion, clarity and abstraction, as Father Robin realizes the end of his journey. Everything is very airy here at the end again, lifting and carrying as ever in the Airoean stratosphere and then, ultimately, it just kind of hangs unresolved, a reflection of the story’s ambiguous close, but leaving the listener wanting just as surely. “Epilogue” formally closes the trilogy with 64 seconds of gentle splashing beneath what a close look at the cover art reveals to be a water wheel, surely symbolizing the ever cycling process of Nature and Life.

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The Songs & Tales of Airoea is a terrifically magical story of Father Robin, the fanciful incarnation of childhood imagination as manifested by a group of friends. Its presentation as a trilogy of classic progressive rock albums, telling Father Robin’s story in three chapters across three biomes, is an ambitious venture that embodies everything that has made progressive rock so amazing and wonderful over more than fifty years now. The concept itself, having unfurled over three decades, is so positively grand and complex as to be ostensibly hubristic, save for a patently obvious devotion to the genre and its tenets. The pitfalls of grandiose works of art, of course, include both the risk of overdoing it and, ironically, coming up short. The Chronicles of Father Robin may have done both here in places but, as a whole, The Songs & Tales of Airoea delivers on its promise of wondrous storytelling wrapped in progressive rock that celebrates its roots as enthusiastically as it delivers these lifelong friends’ take on it.

The Chronicles of Father Robin

– Andreas Wettergreen Strømman Prestmo / vocals, guitars, bass, synth, organ, glockenspiel, percussion
– Henrik Harmer / drums & percussion, synth, backing vocals
– Regin Meyer / flute, organ, piano, backing vocals
– Jon Andre Nilsen / bass, backing vocals
– Thomas Hagen Kaldhol / guitars, mandolin, electronics & sound effects, backing vocals
– Aleksandra Morozova / vocals

Posted by Lone Watie

  1. Your reviews convinced me to buy the trilogy. Got it Friday. Listened to it from start to finish several times over the weekend and I have to say it is truly a phenomenal work.

    Reply

    1. Hey there, Quantum JAK. I really appreciate your comment and I’m super happy you found so much to love in this wonderful project. I think it’s pretty special, myself. Thanks for reading.

      Reply

  2. A reason this website is so special is reviews like this. You are a beautiful person, Lone. Thank you, Last Rites & Co.

    Reply

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