«Doppelgänger» is the third album of the Norwegian, Stavanger-based EGG3 trio, and true to its title focuses on fiction and mythology, as doppelgänger is often portrayed as a ghostly or paranormal phenomenon and usually seen as a harbinger of bad luck. The cover features a photo of the Austrian-American actor-scientist-inventor Heddy Lamarr and EGG3 covers The Cure’s eighties song «A Forest», intended to sound like it was played by the house band at The Bang Bang club on a dark October night in Twin Peaks.

EGG3 was founded by guitarist Vidar Schanche in 2009 as a jazz band that embraces elements of prog-rock, free-improv, and metal, but with a burning desire to sound like «a psychotic dream sequence in a film David Lynch has not yet made». The trio features drummer Ståle  Birkeland and baritone sax player Arild Hoem (who replaced Inge Breistein). «Doppelgänger» was created – recorded, mixed, and mastered, and printed – at the art factory Tou in Stavanger.

Schanche wrote all the pieces, except «A Forest», and, no worries, none sounds like a harbinger of bad luck. His pieces stress the powerful and layered rhythmic attacks of the trio. Hoem fits naturally in this restless, dramatic format, and his solos often color the massive rhythmic onslaughts with melodic lines as on «Gabbagabba» and «Hello». But EGG3 also knows how to sketch the Lynch-ian kind of unsettling and psychotic dreamscapes as on «I am not him. You are», «We accept you, one of us» and the last «Interlude». The cover of «A Forest» deepens these elusive veins and captures EGG3 in its best, creating an addictive, percolating pulse with guest vocalist Eva Bjerga Haugen who updates skillfully the delivery of The Cure’s Robert Smith.

Eyal Hareuveni   

Vidar K. Schanche (g, synth), Ståle  Birkeland (dr), Arild Hoem (bs, synth); Eva Bjerga Haugen (v), Cooper (breathing)