With the new album "Road Back To Ruin" Pristine's musical diversity has returned. After the somewhat too cool album "Ninja" (2017), recorded in just one day, the Norwegian retroro rockers continue here mainly as we had learned to appreciate them on "Reboot" (2016): with that warm-hearted, sweaty blues-soaked hard rock that makes Heidi Solheim and her boys one of the model bands of the genre.
There is something absurd about it when I arrange to meet Heidi Solheim for a "serious" interview for 30 minutes in the business room of a hotel in Tromsø, Pristine's hometown in the far north of Norway. What do you ask someone with whom you have spent two days into the late night just for questions that have not already been answered at the counter or dining table? Moreover, the room is also oversized: For both of us there are almost 30 chairs at an extra long table.
eclipsed: We should get as far apart as we can.
Heidi Solheim: (laughs) Then we also need microphones, don't we?
eclipsed: What I really realized at your concert yesterday is that your guitarist Espen Elverum Jakobsen often sounds like Jimmy Page.
Solheim: Only good that I don't sound so exaggerated like Robert Plant.
eclipsed: With Ann Wilson from Heart there is already a woman who can sound like Plant. And you're not Greta Van Fleet, you're completely independent. Are zeppelins among your influences?
Solheim: When we work on songs, there are a lot of influences on me and us. Of course we love "No Quarter", "Kashmir", "Stairway To Heaven" or "Whole Lotta Love", we don't want to deny that. But we also instinctively borrow something from Elton John or Deep Purple and from completely different, rock distant sounds. All this together makes Pristine.
eclipsed: When I read the song title of one of the ballads of "Road Back To Ruin", "Your Song", I first thought of a cover version of an Elton-John title.
Solheim: Of course I know Elton's song, but my "Your Song" had something acoustic about Neil Young in my head.
