SORNI NAI

It's honestly quite hard to just introduce, or give some form of reassurance for this album, as there really isn't anything else like it for me, so instead I would like to tell of a sort of irrational fear, but respect for the winter.

To me, the winter is a strange time. It is the start and the end of the year, so during the winter there is usually a lot of staying at home, more than what I normally do. It symbolizes thought for me, as it leads into the future, as I sometimes wonder what'll come of me in the next tomorrow. As many may agree, the future is terrifying as it delves into the fear of the unknown. We do not have a machine that can allow us to see into something so mysterious and weird as time, and while I cannot definitively say the unknown scares me as greatly as something like death, or spiders, or heights, or what have you, it still at least makes me wonder, nay even ponder about the aspects that time has given me. We can look at the past, but the future will put us in a chokehold no matter when or where we may be able to look at it with the proper gear.

For me, Sorni Nai by the Russian post metal band Kauan represents that fear, as well as the loneliness and intrigue it may hold.

To give some clarification on what this album is about, this album is a concept record based on the tragic Dyatlov Pass Incident, which was a 1959 event that transpired in Russia, with 9 hikers dying of mysterious, yet found out to be mere natural circumstances. Reading about that incident has given me quite a new perspective on what this album means for my thoughts on the ivory white snow that coats my hometown during the winter seasons.

Whilst, sad to say, I cannot quite fully relate to the events that happened in 1959, as I am an American and not a Russian, I can feel sympathy and some form of relatability to them as I live in a town that usually gets quite a lot of snow each year during the winter seasons, and so I can have at least some eye level in terms of sympathy on that fateful day in Eastern Europe.

Hearing about the incident, whilst also hearing the music, has made me find a strange feeling that I haven't gotten in quite a while, not since I have heard Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada, or, in a more LP example, ( ) by Sigur Ros.

The best way I could describe the feeling I get with this album is a strange sense of loneliness, as well as a puncturing inconsolable feeling that drifts through the seams. I guess what I am trying to say is that the sound this album exudes is one that Sigur Ros does with their albums, mixed with the harsh and brutality of black and doom metal groups like My Dying Bride and or Thy Catafalque.

However, honestly the real beauty of this album doesn't lie in the enigmatic post rock and post metal, which, do not get me wrong, is stellar, but it is the more atmospheric and ambient portions that get me the most. I believe the song At spells it best, specifically with the part of a Russian woman (who I assume is related in some way to one of the 9 hikers) talking and crying. Whilst I do not understand what she is saying, her tears and whimpers make me feel a certain pity that is hard to describe, almost like seeing a moth with a damaged wing trying to fly. The ending song of Sat is another good example of this, being this enigmatic climax as the album, more specifically the hikers lives remembered through the sound and sheer will it exudes, dies on Hell's coldest day. My words honestly cannot give it justice, you really have to listen to it for yourself.

I find this album to not only be one of the best post rock albums, but THE best post metal album. I think all the albums I consider to be a masterpiece have made me feel a certain way that no other album could. A otherworldly sense of beauty and spectacle with Yes' Close To The Edge, or some kind of horror and discomfort with Current 93's I Have A Special Plan For This World. This album makes me feel cold, for the lack of a better term, and it honestly nearly made me cry. I am not a crier, that is for certain, but if your album can make me have a near breakdown of tears, then you gained not only my love, my interest, but also my biggest hand of respect. Truly a sad, wondrous, but sad spectacle put on display.

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.