Metisson vs. the stars with the song “Look To A Star” – Dagsavisen

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music

Mitison

“Look at the star”

a leak

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The pop star takes her next quantum step into the world with “Look To A Star,” with such confident elegance you'll want to buy a hat just so she can take it off. In this case, it would have to be the starfish hat, which became Metteson's trademark and is also on the album cover.

Mitsun has been so dominant in Norwegian music in the last couple of years that you would think the artist had more releases behind him. But this is actually the album's debut, a culmination after a very small string of singles and the EP “Convince Me” (2021). Look To A Star is clearly not a comprehensive reboot of these films. On the contrary, it shows an artist with a wide range, and also a theatrical personality on an internal level that matches the talent that Sverre Breivik possesses as one of the best young actors in the country.

Perhaps this was the theatrical role that Sverre Breivik had to give up due to his pop career under the name Metteson, Riksteatret's 'Stormfule højder', the essence of which you hear in the powerful opening track 'Only The Wind'. Here he turns his back on someone he or she loves: “So I run, I run into the wilderness/Where no path can turn me.”and the song reveals itself as a baroque homage to Kate Bush who made “Wuthering Heights” a pop cultural landmark.

Mitison is also about theatrical spectacle, about blurring the lines between pop genres, gender, time or place. There's something infuriating about the way Breivik builds large canvases of beautiful, infectious, epic pop pearls, without shame or fear of something being too big or over-produced. The introduction alone in “Waves” requires another-world self-assurance if you're not going to collapse midway through. Or the chorus and the way his generation of actors contribute to Den Nationale Scenes when they sing All That to Heaven.

'Look To A Star' can almost resemble a 'concept album' in the sense that the music, lyrics, videos and Metteson's stage performances have a strong, playful theatrical nerve and a clear awareness that is definitely rooted in theater and theatre. Experience from there. We already saw that in 2021, when Mitison owned the Bellarm Theater. The following year's island gig was a small show of strength, but sporadic festival jobs last year, including Aurora's “Warmth” at Kungsbergaz, demonstrated an artist who appears to have mastered the orchestration sought by the compositions and productions.

What's revealing about “Look To A Star” is also how confidently Sverre Breivik handles very simple, emotional songs that seem to drip with personal melancholy. The mainstays of the album are two of them. The extraordinarily sad “Normal” could be imagined if Bruce Springsteen had made one hero In another way, without comparing otherwise. However, it says something about how Mitsson, along with co-composer and producer Vitel Junker, constructs the tunes. The subsequent, dark “Wallace Road”, with its delicate synth, acoustic guitar and cello by Matthias Monsen, grows with each listen from a slightly anonymous first impression.

What you think is beautiful and a little simple, there is more underneath the silk cover than you first felt. But that's the case throughout Look To A Star. Underneath the big, emotional choruses and gorgeous “production design,” the stage is set for a treasure hunt. It's unabashedly catchy at times, but it's also pop art in a format that has many clever, big layers, angles, and movements. This also applies to song lyrics. On “So Far Away,” he sings about being stuck in the past, in what one assumes is an ended love affair. “Even though they're long dead/Sometimes I water our feelings,” he sings, continuing with meticulous detail about the anatomy of a fracture: “I found an eyelash hidden behind the couch the other day/With a tear/Enough to fill my heart.”

“Blue Eyes Open” is a song that more experienced artists—among them Elton John/Bernie Taupin—would likely have written. This sounds like Oscar Wilde's “Loving yourself is the beginning of a lifelong love,” a song that could quickly become a running gag in Mitison's international career. By the way, it really started, especially in the British Isles, when they discovered songs like “Last Resort”, which made it quite far into the 13-track album, the pseudo-electropopler “Put It To Sleep”, “Only The Wind” and the title track , may claim to have found the missing link between the Pet Shop Boys and Bronski Beats. However, it's all too easy to put Mitsun in the '80s nostalgia category. Metisson lets the curtain rise once and for all, for an album that cements the artist's position as the future of Norwegian pop music.