II

This aptly named space rock trio comes from Oulu, Northern Finland. They operate without a producer or a record company, but don't let that give you serious prejudices for their releases. "II" is the first one to have a length of an album - though only 38:12 - , containing four 8 to 11 -minute tracks. First off, what a great cover art and package design! The artist's name can't be found (why?) but the decorative style is influenced by Alfons Mucha and Art Nouveau. Of course it may be debatable how well that beautiful style fits into masculine guitar rock. A little minus for the lack of information texts.

'Beneath the Black Star' starts delicately with moody guitar chords; gradually the steady drum beat gets louder until the tempo slows down a bit and the heavy space rock takes off the ground, so to speak. The angry-ish, rather low vocals increase the feel of Heavy / Metal, and I don't like them myself. Thankfully the vocals are quite sparse and don't try to steal the show. There's some attempt to form powerful vocal harmonies (bassist's vocals backed up by the guitarist) which is good, even though they remain very modest.

'Deserted Planet 2078' has a relaxed, slow rhythm to start with. The bass melodies are nicely audible and the electric guitar has a pleasant bright tone. The sparse vocals are not as angry as on the opener but I don't think they much improve this track which would have worked fine as an instrumental too. 'Spacy Phantasy' has cool, psychedelic echo effects in the beginning, both on guitar and on the voice repeating "hah... ha - hah..". Later on the vocals get slightly more central, but the hazy section starting midway dives deep into spacey spychedelia and makes the track clearly more interesting than the two preceding it. The echoed guitar reappears near the end, resembling certain moments on the '2112' epic by RUSH.

'Sykli' changes into Finnish language. The esoteric lyrics could almost be by PEKKA STRENG. At first the vocals are backed by guitar only, but the atmosphere stays relatively light when the rhythm section joins the playing. But this is the longest track, so the song-oriented, lighter approach is only one side to it. The sound gets heavier and stuffier towards the end. A pity actually, since this only makes all four tracks resemble each other more. Indeed this album could have had much more variety (especially between tracks) and also more of that freshness in sound that appears only here and there. The band improved on their next album.