Audiopile Review: What’s likely to be the final release this year from Blod (but who knows!), the decade-long project from Sweden’s Gustaf Dicksson, is also one of the more perplexingly straight forward that we’ve encountered, particularly after the abstracted tape crunching collab with Shadow Pattern released just prior. Gathering a small cast of Blod regulars, including notable Gothenburg figures Magnus Jäverling (Dicksson’s cohort in the duo Stenhjärta) and Loopsel/Monokultur member Elin Engstrom, the group further explore the Christian folk themes that’s been a reference point through much of Blod’s work. While albums like the year-old Pilgrimssånger ran his idiosyncratic revision of “church music” through a grainy filter of tape-heavy psychedelia or embellished with lo-fi dungeon-synth motifs, Helvetet På Jorden steers headlong into a largely unadorned rendition of choral folk and hymnal seance. Outside of some light synth backings on a handful of tracks, there isn’t much beyond the naked voices and plaintive acoustic guitar, making for a raw, openly expressive album that’s not like much else we’ve heard from the Gothenburg/Discreet universe. Sung entirely in Swedish, we’re only left with the label’s description of the lyrics “dealing with the interaction between love and evil on planet earth” and the earnest, fragile delivery of the vocalists to discern any intent. But that’s enough to convey this is indeed an honest attempt at resurrecting the disappearing art of communal folk music, a long-faded genre that was once prominent in the US during the ’60s-70s Xian psych-folk private press underground scene, and, even more notably, in Blod’s native Sweden, heard via the  commune acts that sprang up around the Träd, Gräs Och Stenar/Harvester scene. You know we’re in strange times when the most straightforward albums in Dicksson’s lengthy catalog is also one his most surprising.

With the intention of doing a proper and full out choir record, Helvetet På Jorden was initiated by Blod two years ago. While the finished album became something slightly different, it’s a much more vocal-based record compared to its thematically linked predecessors Pilgrimssånger (2022) and Där Ska Barnet Vara (2023). Deeply influenced by Swedish church music and psalms, Helvetet På Jorden consists of 10 of the strongest and most fulfilled Blod songs to date, all dealing with the interaction between love and evil on planet earth. All instruments and music by Gustaf Dicksson, with vocals also by Anna Johannesson, Elin Engstrom, Gittan Kock, Myran Dicksson and Magnus Jäverling.