PIMEÄ SAARTAA MEITÄ!

I saluted this first long player of this group mostly due its sincere personal style, balancing between considered popular rock professionalism, rhythmic complexities, quirky artistic expressiveness, fearless sincerity in the lyrics and not forgetting respectful attitude to listeners in the experimentations. Musically this album moves further in progressive rock scope from their fine debut EP. Lyrics have grown to deeper level too, being symbolist and rich detailed rock poetry scanning the world from viewpoint of deeply feeling person, who seems to do much observations and analysis from both inner and outer worlds. The record opens dynamically, building hectic tension with rhythm arrangements, released by melodic vocal themes. Bass weaves a powerful web as basis for the controlled violent imagination of the twisting compositions. Lack of spaces between tracks increases the intensity nicely. Tracks have nice nuances in arrangements, like raw vintage distortion sound contrasting the clean sounds, which vividly enrich the logics of these rock compositions. As some details I liked especially "Irma Vep"'s mathematically clean shortenings of rhythm calculations, and the calmness of "Kiitospäivän ilta" breaking the furious assault with nice sonic landscapes, leading to both solemn, gentle and pleasant cosmic wanderings of "Mediaatio". As a personal experience of the sound aesthetics of conventional modern hard-rock and pop music, I have not found them basically displeasing, but often just been a surface for music lacking interesting content and personality. This band is quite operatic in its burlesque overdoing dramatics and romanticism, and I admit I like this, though detect it as a possible factor for somebody dislikes also. This "darker incarnation of Marillion" also fusions nicely all of their musical elements inherited from the cultural flow of rock as very personal mixture, implementing huge amount of personal progressive elements to rock music sound, and maintaining similarly a solid accessible musical structure. For non-Finnish listeners this stuff could be curious act for checking out, if one should be open to artistic indie rock with nice rhythm details, featuring a female vocalist using weird Fenno-Ugric language.