I wound up ordering Norrøn Livskunst and have had it for a little over a month now (and it came signed, which I hadn't realized). I think it's an incredible album and one of my favorites from 2010. It was really like a little musical journey, discovering it song by song since all of the songs were so different. I bought it on the strength of Vitets Vidd I Verdi and as I listened to it, each track was a bit of a surprise. I certainly wasn't prepared for something like Eukalyptustreet, which is so beautiful, and intense, and unexpected.
It will probably take a bit longer for me to connect with it more fully, because my usual method of absorbing a cd - sitting down and reading the lyrics while listening - doesn't exactly work here. I do not wish the lyrics were in English; I actually think something would have been lost if they were. But I'd love to get it translated at some point, and not by Google, which can't seem to translate a good portion of the words. Here is the first verse of Song Til Stormen:
"Come, strong storm from æverømd,
and steel my will, solve my string!
Åndå lift on my ørneveng
and hired me sight and day in kjømd."
OK...
Anyway, I'll try to work at it and see if I can't eventually get a better feel for the lyrics, if not a word by word translation.In the meantime I've been listening to some of their albums and will definitely need to give those more time. Briefly, Black for Death is the easiest to absorb (though I don't think as captivating as Norrøn Livskunst), Neonism is musically great but will require a lot of getting past the vocals, and In Harmonia Universali is weird, but I think it's a weird that I'm going to like.
