SORNI NAI

Another epic KAUAN album divided into tracks for convenience, "Sorni Nai" is inspired by a mysterious calamity that befell a group of a dozen odd Soviet hikers in the Ural Mountains in 1959. All perished, and several investigations have failed to draw any concrete conclusions. Though the track titles are apparently in the Mansi language native to that area, I have no reason to believe that the band is singing in anything language other than their adoptive Finnish,

The approach is as before: post rock, folk and prog metal all playing off against each other, but always at a slow pace, conveying generally but not always heavy, or at least melancholy, atmospheres. Trademark piano and strings drop in regularly, and sparse generally clean vocals punctuated by occasionally sulky growling round out the soundscape. The first couple of "tracks" are the most uniformly arresting, with several sparkling melodies, after which the album seems to settle, even drag a bit, into a predictably formulaic unpredictability. Unfortunately the divisions between numbers seem much less natural here than in "Pirut", and probably should have been even more finely demarcated if at all.

Not surprisingly, the metal quotient rises in the last 15 minutes, though it's unclear if this is conveying how quickly this fun adventure went south, so to speak, or the machinations of the apparatchik who may or may not have wanted the true cause or causes to go public whether they knew them or not. All I know is, when I plug the album title into google translate and set it to Finnish, I get an expletive that I'm going to assume is directed at the authorities. Then again, when I ask it to automatically detect the language, it proudly responds with "sorry for the inconvenience" in Indonesian, which might be an underreaction by the calloused.

This is one of the first disappointments I've encountered in the KAUAN saga. In spite of its noble goal, "Sorni Nai" sounds more and more like patched together outtakes from prior projects as the album plays out beyond its first 20 minutes. Those inaugural passages and a number of scattered themes later on do keep "Sorni Nai" from getting snowed under.