WHEN SHALL WE KNOW

The Finnish KAAMOS' only album Deeds and Talks will soon be re-released as a vinyl, for which I was kindly asked to write an article (by the way, against my original idea just a moment ago, I decided not to fill this review with citations of it). Unfortunately I had made a poor review of the album itself already in 2005, but there's this totally unreviewed single... It preceded the album by a month and it simply features two tracks from it, without any editing.

'When Shall We Know' is from the funkier end of the album, which contains elements from various musical genres: jazz, blues, funk and classical music flavours are being stirred into a relatively accessible prog-pop with a strong role for Moog and Hammond. Let it be said that I don't agree at all about the subgenre here: probably Prog Folk was chosen because there's some JETHRO TULL influence - and also the composer Ilpo Murtojärvi told me in an e-mail interview that Aqualung had made a big impression on him at the time of composing KAAMOS music - but folk is not among the most obvious ingredients of the style, nor does the instrumentation explain the choice.

'When Shall...' and the album-opening 'Strife' - which is chosen as the B-side of this single - are both nice and quite representable tracks of the colourful and warmhearted album, but not necessarily among the best tracks. The joyful instrumental 'Barokki' and the romantic 'Isabelle Dandelion' are the most classically oriented tracks, while the album-ending, lengthy 'Suit-Case' is without a doubt the proggiest one. I do hope the album will receive some new international recognition as one of the finest Finnish prog albums from the era (ie. the latter half of the 70's), when the genre was rapidly losing popularity. True, Kaamos were not doing anything radically new but rather continued in the direction of bands like TRAFFIC and WIGWAM, but the album still sounds fresh and charming.