CMX - Dinosaurus Stereophonicus (2000)

CD1: 1) Kreetan härkä; 2) Kansantalouden saavutusten näyttely; 3) Ei koskaan; 4) Iliman pielet; 5) Ohjelmansiirtoketjun mittaustauko; 6) Pelon enkeli; 7) Loputtomasti samaa; 8) Ilmestyskirjanpitäjä; 9) Kylmänmarja; 10) Baikonur; 11) Negatiivinen alkusoitto
CD2: 1) Jatkuu niinkuin sade; 2) Tuonen lintu; 3) Luuhamara; 4) Tämän runon tahtoisin unohtaa; 5) Kultaiset portaat; 6) Meidän syntimme; 7) Myrskyn ratsut; 8) Karsikkopuu; 9) Olkoon täysi sinun maljasi; 10) Suurta yötä päin; 11) Tähdet sylissään

The prog beast has been unleashed!

Key tracks: "Jatkuu niinkuin sade", "Meidän syntimme", "Baikonur"

Towards the late 1990s CMX fell out of love with performing live, and it eventually escalated in the band announcing that they would stop touring altogether. The whole hulaballoo that began around this with the media and the fans is now a somewhat infamous chapter in the band’s history, once they awkwardly reversed the decision just a few years later (and they’d steadfastly insist for years to come that they only ever meant a taking hiatus rather than fully cease live performances) but temporary or not, it laid out the groundwork for Dinosaurus Stereophonicus. The two-hour, two-disc giant indulges in CMX’s hitherto somewhat hidden love for progressive rock and it’s above all a studio album: a record written and recorded without a single thought given to whether it could ever be replicated with just four people on stage, utilising every and any technology available in the studio to fulfil a meticulously arranged widescreen vision. One filled with mellotrons, synthesizers and organs, string sections, hundred-head choirs and songs hovering around the ten-minute mark that would be miles beyond anything the band had released before from both a technical and technological standpoint. 

The two separate sections of Dinosaurus Stereophonicus aren't there just because of course you're going to aim for a double album if you're doing your big prog rock record, but also because of how CMX have chosen to approach this vague direction. The ethos is the same across both discs - intensely maximalist, polished to perfection and primed to explore the entire space between the full wingspan what the band are capable of. There's a certain kind of fearlessness I appreciate - and love - when artists take a studio-focused approach like this because it’s often the time when they redefine themselves and blow open new doors. Dinosaurus Stereophonicus is precisely that, and the extra long length serves as the means to separate the two distinct paths that these new paths have lead CMX to: one unpredictable and turned inwards, the other full of pomp and grandeur.

The first disc represents the former approach - the more askew side of the kind of prog rock that CMX pay tribute to. The songs are long and twisted with crooked time signatures with heavier guitar tones and lengthy instrumental sections (including the ultimate taboo - a drum solo), all the way down to multiple fully instrumental songs which appear as the lead-in, the mid-album palate cleanser (“Ohjelmansiirtoketjun mittaustauko”) and the outro. “Kreetan härkä” starts the journey with four minutes of synthesizer-warbling scene setting, from where the album travels through multiple heavy dramatic musical drops and not one but two big giants one right after another, and the conclusion isn’t really even an outro for the last ten songs but a sneaky bridge to the next disc ("Negatiivinen alkusoitto" - "Negative Prelude"). Of those two epochs one is a metal-adjacent churner with a doomsday choir ("Kylmänmarja"), the other a ten-minute ambient space-farer ballad ("Baikonur"). Taken as a whole it's some of the most unpredictable and audience-challenging material CMX have produced to date: more of a mood sequence than a string of evergreens, to be considered as a wider piece even if some pieces are a little easier to take in isolation than others such as mildly arena-flirting “Loputtomasti samaa”.

The second disc is actually the more welcoming of the two halves even though it appears last. The prog elements here emphasise depth of sound rather than hefty experimentation and they retain more conventional (even chorus-friendly) structures: less Tales from Topographic Oceans, more Dark Side of the Moon. You still have space for quirkier cuts like the janky jamming of "Luuhamara" and the atmospheric groove of "Karsikkopuu", but in either case CMX aren’t taking the wilder ideas as far as they did on the first disc and they’re placed right alongside the classic rock singalong "Tämän runon tahtoisin unohtaa" (complete with "hey hey!"s and cowbells) and the vintage prog epic "Olkoon täysin sinun maljasi" with a keyboard sound and solo lifted directly from the 1970s - both of which the first disc would chew and spit out without mercy. The defining element of this half is the presence of a grand choir that "Kylmänmarja" sneakily introduced and which goes on to appear throughout the second set of eleven songs: in the angelic harmonies of the anthem single "Jatkuu niinkuin sade", booming down from the skies to out-heavy the guitars in the grunge beast "Meidän syntimme", to embrace the listener in the galaxy-sized lullaby "Tähdet sylissään". Disc two of Dinosaurus is about the size of the sound and the options it presents, married to clearly distinct and melody-oriented songs - the closest thing to an interlude is the elegiac piano piece "Suurta yötä päin" that strips down the excess for a brief moment while paving the way to the grand finale.

The second disc is the easier way to approach and unlock the album - certainly based on personal experience - but if you were to listen to these as one big block of music then the order here works just right. The first half’s headiness and heftiness is the more intriguing initial dip into the strange waters of the record, and the second half’s more obvious anthems feel more impactful after the tightly wound tension of the first half and they lead more naturally to the grand finale - "Tähdet sylissään" is the awe striking homecoming where seemingly everyone and everything on the album is brought together for one last singalong, in an unashamedly epic manner that’s the only real way to finish something as massive as this album, and it’s a heartwarmingly beautiful song that radiates warmth and understanding, a sense of belonging. I would ultimately say that I personally prefer the second half, just because the new ideas are used to augment what is some of CMX's best songwriting from a melodic perspective: in particular the positively soaring "Jatkuu niinkuin sade", intense "Meidän syntimme" (and its awesome choir drop) and the tender dreamscape of "Myrskyn ratsut" are close to perfection. Whether they’d sound as immense without the extra production values is completely irrelevant (as this argument always is) because they’re songs built around that go-big-or-go-home approach and they ride that wave proudly and beautifully, every grand gesture hitting sweet emotional spots. 

That isn't to say that the first disc is a letdown or that it isn't without its merits: its more arcane approach is inspired in its own right and carries much of the album’s magic on its back. It is however an entity that I need to be in a specific mood for, largely listened to only when I really want to dive deep into the album’s layers. The question that naturally crops up is whether I’d prefer if the album was just the second disc, and maybe from a purely numerical rating perspective that would be the case, but I also reckon the record would lose an important dimension if these two halves didn't compliment one another. It’s what I mean when I say that the second disc unlocks the first: it’s the hook that pulls you in and draws attention to the album’s ideas and concepts, after which the ways the first CD utilises (and in some ways foreshadows) the same concepts and ideas becomes more fascinating to dig into. Not to mention that the first eleven songs are still very good in their own right (bar the instrumentals which really are there just to serve the prog vibe) and I'd lament the loss of its best parts - especially "Baikonur" which is a truly incredible song and the grandeur of which cannot be understated, floating peacefully in the galaxy and sighing with weary beauty for the most wonderful ten minutes. I’d happily stay within its soft electronic hold and comet's tail guitar solos for another ten.

Like many double albums Dinosaurus Stereophonicus is a bit of a compromise act between its parts, everything inevitably balancing out to something that’s a little lesser than perhaps what could’ve been with further editing involved. That'd defeat the point though and it’s not something I hold against the album - it’s an impressive piece of work with many incredible songs, some of which I consider integral to the band and moreso to my feelings about the band. The video for "Jatkuu niinkuin sade" is probably the first time I became aware of CMX and while it would take me another decade before I actually became invested in their music, it did manage to spark something that stuck around in my memory bank. Some fans probably lost the CMX they loved with this record for good given the roughest edges of their music had now been sanded off for good by this stage, and the way the album embraces its more "prog" elements and balances the melodic with the heavy would impact the rest of their career as they continued to move beyond the punk and erratic alternative rock sound of their 1990s. But I always think that each band should have at least one grand studio statement in their back catalogue and the sheer inspired excess that CMX rammed through with it gave them a landmark record and another unique iteration of their sound in their collection.

Rating: 8/10

Various Artists - Lost Christmas: A Festive Memphis Industries Selection Box

1) Field Music - Home for Christmas; 2) Haley - Like Ice and Cold; 3) Warm Digits - Good Enough for You This Christmas; 4) Rachael Dadd - We Build Our Houses Well (with Rozi Plain and Kate Stables); 5) Stats - Christmas Without You; 6) The Phoenix Foundation - Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas; 7) Francis Lung - To Make Angels in Snow; 8) Jesca Hoop - White Winter Hymnal; 9) The Go! Team - Look Outside (A New Year's Coming); 10) The Cornshed Sisters - Have a Good Christmas Time

Sentimental, feel-good indie Christmas music - for once! 

Key tracks: "Good Enough for You This Christmas", "Look Outside (A New Year's Coming)", "Have a Good Christmas Time"

As someone who loves both Christmas and "indie" music, I've listened to my fair share of seasonal non-mainstream releases over the course of my time on this earth (and certainly since they became bizarrely popular in a post-Sufjan landscape) and let me tell you what - it's not easy to find one that sounds like we're celebrating one of the best times of the year. Many artists in the indie spectrum specialise in melancholy or straight-up depressed Christmas music - sometimes with a wink and tongue lodged firmly in cheek as they knowingly cater to the sad banger crowd, sometimes genuinely wanting to dig into that hidden sadness that surprisingly many ye olde Christmas classics carry under their winter coats. That kind of soft melancholy can be oddly cosy, suitable for those quiet evenings when you reminisce on Christmases past or you're winding down from the current one. But downbeat is downbeat, no matter how much tinsel you put on top of it - as evidenced by the many snide questions I've had about why I'm listening to such depressing music at Christmas.

Lost Christmas was born from sad events - the UK label Memphis Industries had to cancel their annual Christmas event due to COVID, and instead in its place the label decided to issue a compilation of new and borrowed material from willing acts in their roster. Despite the less than optimal change of plans and the title, Lost Christmas has turned out to be one of the rare Christmas albums of its ilk that genuinely sound like they welcome the season. It's happy. It has the kind of warmth that comes from genuine excitement for the season, wrapped with a bow of bittersweet but comforting nostalgia and coated with the tinsel of adulthood reality in comfortable measures. Even when the lyrics aren't necessarily excited about the Big Day, they still glow with a careful positivity: "Good Enough for You This Christmas" only hopes that whatever can be done do on the day is something special after the trials of 2020 ("it won't be perfect - it's still worth it!"), while "Look Outside (A New Year's Coming)" skips Santa entirely and raises its view towards the next year and better times in the horizon. That optimism is really resonant.

There are a few lesser songs in Lost Chrismas' short but sweet half-hour-ish run time - The Phoenix Foundation's twee robot take on "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is probably the least essential inclusion but it raises a little smile nonetheless, and Jesca Hoop joining the push on making "White Winter Hymnal" a seasonal classic doesn't quite do it for me - and to be honest, I blame a lot of that on hearing British TV personality Alexander Armstrong covering it for his Christmas album and instantly gentrifying the song as a result. But even with Hoop's song, the sneaky interpolation of "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" it secretly contains within is masterfully done and lifts the song up. Both turn out to be minor imperfections on what is otherwise a real treats selection. Some acts bat for team sentimental (Haley and their gentle acoustic landscape, the magic winter wonderland of Rachael Dadd) and others for holiday cheer (Field Music's Christmas musical opener, Stats' karaoke funk, the carefully romantic Francis Lung), and what they share between one another is a lot of heart and plenty of hooks. Memphis Industries' roster is full of quirky but delightful indie pop, and the acts selected here represent that really well

The undisputed high points here are the aforementioned and gloriously swooning "Good Enough for You This Christmas" by Warm Digits and The Go! Team's very Go! Team-esque "Look Outside (A New Year's Coming"), both of which have already become Flintcore holiday staples. They're stunningly perfect pop songs that adorn themselves in big melodies and a larger-than-life pop bombast and, they carry a kind of earnestness in term that really makes a great Christmas song; no empty clichés, but an appreciation for the feeling of the season, whatever exactly that is for each person. The Cornshed Sisters close the selection beautifully with another now-favourite: "Have a Good Christmas Time" is a cosy dressing gown, cup of warm glögi in hand and an idyllic fireplace crackling in the background, bidding Christmas evening to a good night with a gently-sung lullaby. It's wonderfully feel-good and like comfort food, and appeals to my soppy yuletide heart. The quiet Christmas greetings at the end are the only time Lost Christmas succumbs into real cheese, and honestly - it's perfect and I'll allow it.

That slightly cheesy happiness, the cosiness - it all hits the spot because (and obvious thing is obvious) I am a Christmas romantic: I've had the pleasure and privilege of having grown in a household where Christmas was considered a special time full of traditions and family closeness, and that's carried over to my own adult days. While I love my weird and wallowing holiday hits, I didn't realise how large of a gap there was in my collection in terms of music that actually reflects my own feelings towards Christmas in tune and tone, even if not always in lyric. Lost Christmas has filled that gap by surprise and it's now an essential holiday listen for me - and with the added bonus of it being one I can actually put on in the background without raising too many eyebrows from others. It came in the wake of a rough year for many, and it was made to lift people's spirits again when many of us were denied from spending the season the way we wanted to. In December 2021 - the time of writing this - we're still facing some of those trials and tribulations, but Lost Christmas is still here to glow up the room with cheer for all for at least its precious 34 minutes, still bright.

Rating: 8/10

Physical corner: none, no CD release exists which is a crime and I will probably pester the label yearly about it until they cave in just to appease my inane obsession. You've been warned.

Bat for Lashes - The Bride (2016)

1) I Do; 2) Joe's Dream; 3) In God's House; 4) Honeymooning Alone; 5) Sunday Love; 6) Never Forgive the Angels; 7) Close Encounters; 8) Widow's Peak; 9) Land's End; 10) If I Knew; 11) I Will Love Again; 12) In Your Bed

Finally dwelling deeper into those soundtrack-like qualities of the prior albums with a full on concept album, but that concept seems to come before the songs.

Key tracks: "In God's House", "Sunday Love", "Close Encounters"

It was only a matter of time until Bat for Lashes came up with a bonafide concept album given the love for wider themes that Natasha Khan has demonstrated in her prior albums, and The Bride couldn't be more BfL-esque if it tried. With so much of the Bat for Lashes discography centered around romantic notions that are more longing than loving and almost fatalistic in their devotion, naturally the first full-on story that Khan devises is about a bride-to-be is left alone at the altar after the groom is killed in a car crash on the way to the church. Amidst her grieving, the never-wed decides to take the intended honeymoon trip by herself while searching for answers and meaning in the universe. The Bride wanders the mountains and the seas, connects spiritually with her former partner and ultimately finds the first strands of will to go on, but ultimately the story arc is left unresolved - because how could you ever neatly reconcile such a dramatic loss?

It's always been obvious that soundtracks rank highly among Khan's musical inspirations, and one of the biggest compliments you can give to The Bride is how much it sounds like a score to a film she put her vocal tracks over. Khan weaves dramatic arcs, builds tension and sets up narrative threads in the way a director puts together a film - the songs act as scenes that link together into a greater whole, where everything serves the narrative first and foremost. You don't even need to know it's a concept album to understand that, simply because of how vividly the music tells the story. It's in no small part because the musical language Khan uses throughout is closer to film scores than indie pop albums: the sound here is deeply atmospheric and leaves a space for the narrative to course through, built on sparse elements which are used less as melodic tools and more as methods to decorate the unfolding scenes, where percussion is minimal at best. Khan's voice in the center is practically ethereal thanks to the vast amounts of space the arrangements leave around it, and she brings the central character to life with dramatic, actor-like yearning. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if someone did think this actually is an expanded accompaniment to a visual counterpiece, and I have to give Khan kudos for how The Bride is both a film and its soundtrack at once.

You know there's a 'but' though, and it's a two-fold matter. Despite its narrative cohesion, The Bride as an album is one of two halves where the first steps take wider moves with a bit of a beat to their step, while the second half sinks deep into that soundtrack feel by acting as singular suite of sustained moods. The first set of songs is closer to the established core sound for Bat for Lashes and does well merging this album's more widescreen ideas into Khan's ideas of pop songs. They're not among Khan's best compositions but they leave a lingering impression and in their own right are a stable ground to build an album on. The drama of "In God's House" is what truly kicks the album into gear after the intentionally and ingeniously sweet bridal march "I Do" and the nervous "Joe's Dream" act as the extended intro and it sounds a little special on that alone, and "Sunday Love" dashes forward with a nervous step and injects some much-needed energy to the record after four songs of moody marching. It's an impressive start even if not such a stand-out outside the album context, but what that initial run of songs does do is build up the tragedy and ache of the album, steadily winding the spring tighter, for that pay-off to come.

It never does. I mentioned how the album's story arc feels like it's missing an ending, and that carries through to the music. The entire bottom half of the record is one anonymous mood piece, exquisitely crafted but oddly empty: illustrating scenes to film which, at the end of the day, doesn't exist. It's rather pretty at places - "Land's End" and "If I Knew" especially - but in practice what happens is that the dramatic (and musical) build up of the first half ends up fizzling out quietly before the abrupt credits roll. Much of the final run of songs feel like segues or bridges between greater moments, but with all those important cornerstones missing and all you have are the thin strands. They're inconsequential and unmemorable at worst, and lovely enough ambience with no depth at best. Making matters inadvertently a little worse is "Close Encounters" which starts off that sequence of spatial ballads, and which is the one song on this record I would count as among Khan's very best. Made out of mostly just strings, her voice and a celestial choir of backing vocals, in this one song she consolidates together all the pain and longing that the album's central story arc is built around to a most devastating degree, with a chorus melody that is one of the most immediately piercing and disarming moments she has ever committed to tape. Everything that comes afterwards tries to do the same but sound like half-thought epilogues, all one after another: a stream of songs with barest of ideas that disappear into one another as well as into the ether immediately after hearing them.

I do honestly admire the ideas that Khan presents on The Bride and it has all the makings of a truly special Bat for Lashes album, one which would dive delightfully deep into the musical and thematic concepts that have been lurking around in the background for a while. The ideas around the production and the arrangements, the widescreen drama in the actual music itself and Khan's vocal performance (probably her best so far) are all top notch and clear takeaways from the album. It's almost unfair then how the actual songs fall short, and the further the album moves the less life it has. The danger of concept albums is when the concept overrides the musical content and you can see it happen here: the trappings are all in place but as a set of songs - in melodies, hooks, emotional resonance - it's Khan's weakest so far. The comparisons to soundtracks feel so apt once more, because so many scores turn out be incredibly meandering no matter how much you love the source material when the visual accompaniment they're meant to go with is stripped away. The arrangements for The Bride favour space, but the deeper you get into the album the more it feels like it's just emptiness. There are many things to love The Bride for - I'm not rating this all the way to the bottom, after all - but as a selection of music it's almost underbaked.

Rating: 6/10

 

Physical corner: A gatefold with a lyrics/art booklet. All in wonderfully glossy packaging throughout though, which I'm such a sucker for.

CMX - Vainajala (1998)

1) Iskusävelmä; 2) Surunmurhaaja; 3) Vainajala; 4) Vierasta viljaa; 5) Ei yksikään; 6) Taivaan lapset; 7) Sillanrakentaja; 8) Laulu palavasta linnusta; 9) Eufrat; 10) Kirjeitä paratiisista; 11) Arkangeli; 12) Vanha talvitie

CMX kick off their next chapter with an honest, loud rock album.

Key tracks: "Surunmurhaaja", "Taivaan lapset", "Arkangeli"

Vainajala is a skin shedding moment for CMX. After an early career full of divergent musical strands, the band have figured out who they are and more importantly, how to blend all that raw power, emotional grace and trickster prog flair into a singular sound that represents CMX above anything else. Along with that, they’ve got a new drummer with Tuomas Peippo whose machine-like precision serves as the perfect technical and diverse backbone to the band's growing ideas. Unlike the prior handful of albums which had long gestation periods due to the band figuring things out within the studio, the idea for Vainajala was to go with gut feeling and capture the spark quickly. Faith No More’s Billy Gould was enlisted as the producer as CMX holed up in a Lapland cabin for a mere couple of weeks to crank out the record, and the change in the man behind the desk to someone brand new instead of the old friends who produced the prior albums has arguably been just as important to the band in helping them forge ahead a new path. In the greater scheme of things Vainajala was a bit of a detour in itself and rather unrepresentative of the next stretch of records, but it was a palate cleanser, wiping the slate clean for the next steps.

Funny enough, Vainajala turned out to be an honest rock album. It’s not the much dreaded "back to basics" - CMX’s basics were never like this - but it is an intentionally more straightforward album, even if the prog rock tendencies creep in subtly by way of understated time signature shenanigans and little segments like the non sequitur breakdown of lead single "Ei yksikään". It's an album lead by big guitars and the sturdy classic four-member rock band groove, with A.W. Yrjänä alternating between a shouting maniac and a charismatic frontman as he adopts both sides of his frontman persona - it's music that's meant to be played loud, ideally in front of people. After the line-up changes and restless changes in direction, its role is a succint and instinctive re-introduction for the band as well as a needed re-focus to line the sights up for the future. As these things often go, it’s not a particularly nuanced or deep album, and you can easily say that not only has much of the band's former edge been toned down, but that there is definitely a really fine line between the album as it stands and a safe, radio-friendly rock album - by the Finnish definition of one, at least. 

 
Vainajala holds its ground because ultimately it’s a (pun intended) rock solid record. The songwriting favours punchy hooks over artistic flair but the little prog tangents and Yrjänä's lyricism (can't say I've heard many rock songs tap onto the Kalevala meter like "Laulu palavasta linnusta" does) keep it distinguishably CMX-esque. There's always been a good couple get-to-the-chorus rock jams per album and CMX know how to carve their crooked melodies within a more foot tap inviting structure, and this just happens to be an album full of them for once. Gould's production isn't flashy but it's got some muscle to it which befits the chosen direction, and the band-centric arrangements mean that the few keyboard and backing vocal parts that do appear sound all the more lush. There's no new ideas for CMX within Vainajala, but you are effectively dealing with a great rock band playing snappy rock songs with a renewed spirit, and it's hard to complain about it - especially when the hits keep coming. A handful of these reach all the way to the hallowed canon: the twinkling "Taivaan lapset" is exhuberantly melodic, "Laulu palavasta linnusta" fiercely battering rams ahead, and "Vanha talvitie" is one of the band's all time great closers, lurching forward full of deep melancholy and purging volume, its ever-towering coldness growing into handsome heights. CMX work excellently as "just" a rock band as well, which Vainajala demonstrates excellently. It's only a few times where it feels like the band is starting to run on thin ince, namely the schlager-leaning "Sillanrakentaja" and "Kirjeitä paratiisista" (which wastes its powerful opening, leading on from the interlude/intro "Eufrat") lean a little too close to less exciting radio rock waters; I've also never been too taken by the prog-punk gremlin "Ei yksikään" despite its memetic scream-along chorus, as it feels like a song trying to be tricky for tricky's sake with its tempo shifts and stop-starts, which end up muddling the tune more than they make it interesting. But they're minor bumps than blemishes, and quickly brushed off. 

That said, some of the songs that stick the hardest are the ones where the band stray from the core thesis. The particularly brilliant "Surunmurhaaja" wraps its manic ruckus within entrancingly atmospheric verses which are unlike anything else on the record, and "Arkangeli" towards the end is a serene acoustic ballad that turns out to be one of the album's stand-out moments, part in due because that contrast is a welcome respite by that point in the runtime, but also because it features one of Yrjänä's most beautiful vocal melodies in the chorus with a particularly fantastic backing vocal part emphasising that melody. "Vierasta viljaa" starts as an acoustic ballad as well to showcase early on that not everything here is guitars-to-eleven, but when it finally does break out the electrics for its final chorus the effect is magnified and it's one of the boldest parts of the record - the parts you remember the most. And somewhere there lies the distillation of where my overall opinion on Vainajala stands. There's no doubt that it's a really good record, but it's also not an album that I think about when I reach out for CMX. Next to its more flamboyant peers it starts to grow pale and its most interesting parts are the ones where the band do something a little more different than what the rest of the album actually stands for. 

I don't like rating "against" an album because it's a more straightforward rock record - my tastes are nowhere near complicated enough to even pretend I could do that with a good conscience - but as good as CMX are playing things loud and straight, it's not where their greatest appeal lies. Vainajala is an album of bangers and there's a time and place for that - but I actually associate some of these songs more closely with their places in later compilation albums than this actual tracklist. Nonetheless, it sets off CMX's next chapter with a blast, and that re-energising would serve the band brilliantly going forward. That alone gives it a place in the pantheon.

Rating: 7/10

Physical corner: In a typical CMX fashion, a basic jewel case with a standard-good booklet featuring some artwork, the lyrics and a band shot. You've been here before with these guys, you know the drill.

Bat for Lashes - Two Suns (2009)

1) Glass; 2) Sleep Alone; 3) Moon and Moon; 4) Daniel; 5) Peace of Mind; 6) Siren Song; 7) Pearl's Dream; 8) Good Love; 9) Two Planets; 10) Travelling Woman; 11) The Big Sleep

Taking the right lessons away from the debut, this is where Khan establishes what Bat for Lashes stands for.

Key tracks: "Glass", "Daniel", "Pearl's Dream"

I spoke in my review for Fur and Gold how that album has lost its shimmer as years have gone by, but on the other hand Two Suns has has only begun to shine brighter with time. Natasha Khan's sophomore album as Bat for Lashes is exactly how you should follow up a debut with potential like Fur and Gold, by taking those unique elements that did work the first time around and fearlessly double down on them by expanding and refining. The results speak for themselves: Two Suns has become synonymous with Bat for Lashes and still remains as the number one thing that comes to my mind when I hear Khan's name.

What sets Two Suns apart from its predecessor - and most of the other Bat for Lashes albums in general - is its go-big-or-go-home attitude. There was a lot going on in the background during the recording process and Khan, always fond of expressing herself theatrically, imbibed on it: a relationship started and ended during the writing process which became the album's cornerstone inspiration, she followed her new love to New York where the album was largely recorded, and during her adventures there she devised an alter ego named Pearl who she dressed up as during her tenure in the States and who crops up in a handful of songs. Those big notions and grand gestures in turn influenced the music to grow in a similar fashion, and so Two Suns makes a clear departure from the debut’s skeletal bedroom gloom by presenting itself more vividly. "Glass", the opener, starts with a quiet hymnal which could easily have been at home within the debut but it soon breaks into a storm of layered percussion and bellowing vocals, Khan stretching her wings as she breaks away from the chrysalis of the debut into the new, multi-layered world. Where debut avoided dramatic musical gestures, Two Suns revels in them.

Khan and her musical language nestle into that perfectly. Two Suns isn’t about towering bombast or epic measures, but Khan is painting her visions with a fuller palette which makes the songs reach higher. She still finds solace in minimal soundscapes as and when seen fit - the beautiful piano ballad "Moon and Moon", the askew gospel of "Peace of Mind", the haunting Scott Walker-backed closing lullaby "The Big Sleep" - but she's juxtaposing them by adopting new rulesets for the other songs, the most important of which is really leaning into that knack for a spellbinding hook she's got. She's writing something close to pop songs now and she's perfect at balancing that more direct approach with a more fleshed-out production that emphasises her signature traits. The jaunty and twangy "Sleep Alone", anthemic "Pearl's Dream" and percussion rave of "Two Planets" are Khan's versions of widescreen pop songs and they're sublime, clearly from the same dreamland the debut conjured up but more vivid and commanding. None moreso than the lead single "Daniel". Khan has always loved the 1980s and that influence will crop up throughout her back catalogue in a myriad of ways; "Daniel" is her take on the dramatic synth pop songs littered throughout that decade which rushed through their showstopper choruses with near-anxious urgency. She's done many songs more intricate and more specifically characteristic to her than the tribute flair of "Daniel", but she's never done anything as instantly gripping and lastingly striking. "Daniel" stands out as Khan's signature song for a reason, a once-in-a-career big hit (from an artistic perspective, though to a lesser extent commercially too) single that stands timelessly within her own ouevre despite its clear influences.

I make a number of comparisons between the debut and Two Suns because to me they are clearly linked and in particular how the latter feels like wish fulfillment based on the former, as if Khan and I had shared the mild criticisms I had of that record and she went forward exactly how I wanted her to go for the follow-up. "Horse & I" and "What's a Girl to Do?" were such massive standouts on the debut because they were so much livelier than anything else on that album and Two Suns takes their wider arrangements as the blueprint for an entire album. Even the subtler moments feel more developed than most of the debut, "Moon and Moon" and the achingly solemn "Travelling Woman" in particular sounding all the more vulnerable and longing because of how they contrast with their immediate neighbours. Two Suns is an obvious case of an artist understanding the breadth of their talent and making it their goal to bring that artistic growth to life in full bloom, confidently and fearlessly. The whole album feels like it has a point to prove about its importance - from the attention-demanding arrangements to the inter-referential lyrics that give the album an air of a pseudo-concept record - which Khan and her team took great effort to make sure they can back that point up. In doing so, Two Suns established itself as the center of Khan's galaxy; an excellent record highlighting every reason why one should fall in love with Bat for Lashes.

Rating: 8/10

Physical corner: A standard jewel case with a fairly minimal and short booklet with no lyrics apart from the verse from Song of Solomon (quoted in "Glass" and referenced later in "Two Planets"). It's not particularly interesting, though if you want concrete proof of the wider arrangements on this album compared to the debut, the size of the track-by-track credits section makes it obvious.

CMX - Cloaca Maxima (1997)

CD1 (Physis): 1) Ainomieli '97; 2) Nimetön; 3) Kultanaamio; 4) Nahkaparturi; 5) Nainen tanssii tangoa; 6) Vallat ja väet; 7) Kirosäkeet; 8) Suljettu astia; 9) Elokuun kruunu; 10) Rautakantele; 11) Hiki; 12) Manalainen; 13) Kätketty kukka; 14) Linnunhammas; 15) Marian ilmestys
CD2 (Aetheris): 1) Hiljaisuuteen; 2) Ruoste; 3) Helvetin hyvä paimen; 4) Talviunia; 5) Turkoosi; 6) Veden ääri; 7) Aura; 8) Pelasta maailma; 9) Tähteinvälinen '97; 10) Tulikiveä; 11) Yöllisiä; 12) Mikään ei vie sitä pois; 13) Yö ei ole pimeä päivä; 14) Talvipäivänseisaus
CD3 (Astralis): 1) Musiikin ystävälliset kasvot '97; 2) Katariinanpyörä (Akustinen); 3) Siivekäs; 4) Hyvä tahto; 5) Joet; 6) Aamutähti '97; 7) Keskellä; 8) Marmori; 9) Seittemän Jeesusta; 10) Riitti; 11) Saatana; 12) Pimeä maa (Live); 13) Näkyjen pitelijä; 14) Shakti; 15) Reuna

A summarised chronicle of the first six albums and the assorted b-sides and rarities; and the particularly exciting new songs tucked away.

Key tracks: Out of the new and "new" songs - "Ainomieli '97", "Siivekäs", "Saatana"

CMX have made it a habit to close chapters of their story through the Cloaca Maxima compendiums, and the very first arrived at a particularly relevant time: drummer Pekka Kanniainen had left the band per mutual agreement by the time the compilation was out (his final recordings with CMX are here), which naturally left CMX reflecting on where they were and how they'd got there. They had been cult underdog punks who had somehow turned into national hitmakers, and the stylistic chaos of Discopolis had stirred the pot so that the next steps the temporary trio would take were still unclear both to everyone and themselves. The three discs of Cloaca Maxima act as the chronicles of that strange journey from the gritty beginning to the present: the first two collect together the singles and favourite album cuts, split between the louder, rowdier and more direct songs on disc 1 and slower, prettier and stranger ones on disc 2, while the third disc presents b-sides, previously unreleased recordings and brand new songs. Thorough and sprawling, it acts as the full stop for their first lifecycle before moving onto the next.

The third disc is going to be the big point of interest for most people who listen to this compilation at this point, so let's tackle that first. From a b-side perspective CMX weren't at this stage particularly wild with the format, and so the third CD largely consists of direct outtakes from their parent albums and it's clear why some of these weren't considered strong enough to make it to the actual records in the end. That isn't to say they're disappointing songs (only the largely pointless live version of "Pimeä maa" and thoroughly by-the-numbers "Hyvä tahto" go there), but any b-side maniac looking for that next hidden gem is unlikely to find many here. That said, there are some particularly delectable rarities here: the acoustic version of "Katariinanpyörä" is better than the original album version, the bonkers "Seittemän jeesusta" seems to be created out of elements from completely different songs (that bass groove with that acoustic picking and those odd electic guitar interjections?) and thoroughly stands out from the crowd, and "Saatana" tricks the listener with its acoustic first half before it unleashes its skeletal beat, off-kilter flute flourishes and a hell of a chorus which could've been on a single in itself. The re-recording of the early EP cut "Musiikin ystävälliset kasvot" which starts the third disc is effectively here to canonise one of their best early songs as part of the contemporary CMX lore, with the arrangement of the original version retained but everything else beefed up, and so the song is objectively improved as its maniac rock gets some muscles under it. The same goes for the re-recording of Aurinko's "Ainomieli" which receives its official coronation as one of the band's greats after being almost dismissed from its parent album in fear of being too commercial - now, here, it's showered with the respect it deserves and gets a similar faithful boost in performance and production which makes it the definitive version of the song (and it was also finally released as a single to promote the compilation). The other two 1997 re-takes across the three discs are on the other hand much less impressive: "Tähteinvälinen" has been given a new mix with a little more edge but it's still a semi-awkward song, and the brand new (and so thoroughly 1990s) trip hop -esque remix of "Aamutähti" is not a patch on the original and really shouldn't be here taking away its spot

The actual highlights are instead in the brand new songs - five in total, but three in particular. Following directly from Discopolis CMX have continued to flirt with electronic elements (and the prevalent use of drum machines could be seen as the band experimenting around without a drummer, given the circumstances), but the spirit of these songs is closer to the somber and graceful Rautakantele; "Joet" in fact is a Rautakantele outtake that wasn't finished in time for the album and which was now finally given the chance to get recorded. "Siivekäs", "Joet" and "Marmori" are bound together by their slower tempos, acoustic guitars guiding the rhythm and the gorgeous string arrangements that act as the dominant element of each song, with atypically longing and romantic lyrics from Yrjänä - all very Rautakantele, but the first two still retaining the programmed drums and synthesizer swerves of the directly preceding album. The gentle "Joet" and the more CMX-leaning guitar walls of "Marmori" are both beautiful songs in their own right, but "Siivekäs" is the gem of the entire compilation - it leans so heavily into its synthetic elements that it could be considered CMX's take on synth pop, and within the atmospheric production and breathtaking strings lies a truly phenomenal song full of pathos, emotion and stand-out melodic bliss. It's a strange creature which sounds both classic at first sight and yet even now almost subversive for the band, but above all it's an all-time great for the band - a swooning, epic, beautiful creature out of sync with everything else on the compilation but which rivals the very best the past albums had to offer. "Shakti" and "Piste" which close the compilation are on the other hand more direct Discopolis remnants, with "Shakti" a deranged clipshow of a quasi-dance song composed out of segments left on the editing room floor and "Piste" acting as its detached outro - they're not a patch on the other three songs and they'll never be anything but curios for the fans (and obvious disc filler), but in the right mindset can be a strange amount of fun.

As far as the actual Best Of portion of Cloaca Maxima goes, it does serve the purpose of really putting it into perspective how exciting CMX could be across their first six albums. The band's first decade was an uneven ride where inconsistency was often the norm and so while the first two discs represent a rather cleaned-up version of the discography so far with the dodgy bits polished off, it also highlights perfectly why those albums are worth a visit because there's so many great moments scattered across them. The selection isn't perfect (where's "G"? The "Aamutähti" remix?) and it skews strongly towards the trilogy of hit records from Aura onwards: the debut album Kolmikärki is only represented by a single song ("Nahkaparturi", which is a fine representation of it at least), though it is explained in the extensive liner notes that the band struggled to pair up the shoddy sound quality of the early ears next to to the more professionally recorded follow-ups. Even with the quirks, it's hard to deny just how solid the run of songs across both discs is and especially so on the non-stop rock and roll fierceness of the first disc, with a hit after hit after an obscure album cut which doesn't pale all in comparison to the canon classics. Despite the uneven weighting between the six albums and the scattered early EPs, the selection that did make the cut do represent all the sides of this era of CMX accurately and they work so tightly as a set of songs (the flow from the hymnal "Hiljaisuuteen" to the gentle "Ruoste" is actually ingenius) that even an established fan can get a kick out of listening to this once in a while. As an added bonus, and if you know Finnish, the liner notes feature Yrjänä's nutshell thoughts on each song ranging from interesting trivia and anecdotes to delightfully Nordic bluntness ("A song where I got quite close to what I wanted", he so elaborately writes on "Talvipäivänseisaus"). 

The first Cloaca Maxima feels particularly poignant given the sheer amount of development CMX went through during its timeframe, how Kanniainen's departure gave the band a natural sequence break and how from the next album (and the next drummer) onward they really did feel like CMX 2.0. This, then, is the summarised chronicle of CMX's successes so far, a reminder of how they became one of Finland's most influential rock acts. In the playlist age it's often easy to forget how compilations like these were often treated like important milestones for artists, in particular whenever actual care was taken during the drafting process - and Cloaca Maxima really does feel like the well deserved rest at the winner's podium after the first race.

Rating: 8/10

Physical corner: The three discs are stored in a "chubby" style multi-CD jewel case, which gives it that extra physical impression and suits the chapter-defining archival nature of the selection. The liner notes, as detailed before, contain Yrjänä's descriptions on each song and all the lyrics for the third disc.

Bat for Lashes - Fur and Gold (2006)

1) Horse and I; 2) Trophy; 3) Tahiti; 4) What's a Girl to Do?; 5) Sad Eyes; 6) The Wizard; 7) Prescilla; 8) Bat's Mouth; 9) Seal Jubilee; 10) Sarah; 11) I Saw a Light

Welcome to the mystical world of Bat for Lashes - even though it's not quite the welcome you once might've thought it to be.

Key tracks: "Horse and I", "Trophy", "What's a Girl to Do?"

Time has unexpectedly removed some of the charm of Fur and Gold. Back in 2006 this was an incredibly exciting debut release from a new artist with a particularly characteristic touch to her music, and whose debut gave us the chance to peer into the musical fairytale world she called her own. Since then we've had many more Bat for Lashes releases which have built up on that initial excitement, and which have at the same time accidentally revealed just how one-note Natasha Khan's debut actually was - and in retrospect, just how much of its magic was reliant on two songs in particular. One of them, "Horse and I", is one of the defining debut album openers of the new millennium - a thrilling journey of a song that sets out Khan's entire ethos and manifesto and then crafts a world around those in just under three minutes, built on a small number of very particular elements (with a harpsichord of all things in the lead role) but marching on like a juggernaut, making for an incredibly powerful introduction. The other, "What's a Girl to Do?", takes those same ideas and marries them to a more traditional pop song format with the result coming across like a gothic nightmare take on Motown; with Khan's alluring personality, an instantly attention-demanding set of hooks and a swooning, theatrically bombastic chorus, as well a classic music video, it easily set itself out as one of 2006's best singles and still commands attention the moment the music player queues it up.

Beyond those songs Fur and Gold just isn't as superlative as it felt originally though, which is as strange as it is a little sad. Khan has a very particular vision for her music - all widescreen, dramatic and mystical, lyrics full of wild conjurations and bat lightning hearts - and in her later albums she's weaved those ideas into a multitude of sounds and styles that she now calls her own. Fur and Gold in comparison is all gothic gloom, crawling tempo and sparse arrangement where the lack of elements is as much of an instrument as the steady simple beats, strings, the occasional bass and Khan's keyboards are. Which isn't a bad formula to build songs upon and many of the cuts here - the hypnotic "Trophy", seductively sleazy "The Wizard", the Nick Cave -esque "Sarah", the quiet "Sad Eyes" - do well with it. It simply gets very similar very soon when there's little variety involved, which is all the more apparent towards the backside of the album when Khan has started to exhaust her bag of tricks, and what initially impressed now already seems rote. "Bat's Mouth" and "Seal Jubilee" already run on fumes, and the closing "I Saw a Light" is practically exhausting with its six-and-half minute duration and ends the album with by committing the cardinal sin of being boring. Khan has laid out a solid foundation for herself but the relative lack of range gets a little monotonous, and sonical shake-ups like "What's a Girl to Do" and the surprisingly bright-eyed and airy "Prescilla" that liven things up just by way of offering something different are few and far between.

Khan herself is incredibly compelling as a storyteller for these surreal dream-like scenarios she sets out in her songs and she's by far the stand-out aspect of Fur and Gold. Even when the music threatens to turn into a bog you have to wade through and the lyrics veer a little too close into particularly vivid teen diary poetry, she's front and centre with her charisma pulling everything together into a functionable whole. Without her in lead this'd be half the album it is now because as far as the material itself goes, apart from the handful of highlights Fur and Gold sticks a lot less than it gives the impression of. Still, it's not an album I can badmouth even as the years have dimmed its shine. Khan's simply written better, more consistent records further on in her career and by assessing her journey (so far) as a whole, I guess I've finally come to realise that I only ever did listen to this album on the strength of a few select songs while the rest acted as enjoyable enough padding in-between. It's a compelling sound with much promise, but promise turns out to be the key word after all.

Rating: 6/10

CMX - Discopolis (1996)

1) Discoinferno; 2) Antroposentrifugi; 3) Nimetön; 4) Aamutähti; 5) Jerusalem; 6) Vallat ja väet; 7) Paha; 8) Suljettu astia; 9) Epäonnisten liikemiesten helvetti; 10) Arcana; 11) Silmien ummistamisesta Nansenin galvanointiin

Enter the industrial disco inferno. Twists, turns and loops.

Key tracks: "Antroposentrifugi", "Aamutähti", "Vallat ja väet"

Where to start? If you are following CMX's journey chronologically then Discopolis is the first truly befuddling curveball they throw at you; and if you're just going through the back catalogue in a random order, it's still going to be a strange trip no matter when you stumble onto it. Let down by the self-production experiment of Rautakantele where they had the songs ready before they hit the studio, together with an ol' faithful friend Gabi Hakanen the band took the total opposite route for the follow-up. Instead of having already written the material the band started recording sketches, demos and ideas in the studio and then began to construct the actual songs by cutting and clipping sections together, utilising the latest studio technology (this is apparently Finland's first ever ProTools-recorded album?) to form a piecemeal record. And that still doesn't explain how the songs turned out the way they did, as the band took the highly technological approach as inspiration to head towards an industrial techno-hell soundscape where heavy metal riffs would mingle with remix-ready drum loops: where you can't tell where the irony ends and earnest experimentation begins in-between the mosh pit numbers, the heartfelt moments where the facade is stripped off and whatever side the sardonic smoky jazz club number "Paha" is meant to represent.

Discopolis gets a weird rep because it is a weird album, both on the obvious surface level and - once you get to know it a bit better - perhaps moreso a little deeper under the surface as well. It finds CMX at crossroads: after two incredibly successful albums with big ballad hits and a more nuanced (some might say audience-friendly) sound CMX were bigger than ever, but the internal schism with drummer Pekka Kanniainen's disillusionment with the band and the music industry had began to affect the group's internal chemistry and the band's future was looking blurry. Throwing themselves into this studio experiment that was so different to their former recording ethos feels like a carpe diem moment to try and stoke a new fire going - and the loop-heavy approach probably helped with the issues with Kanniainen too. It's an album of thrown-in ideas where nothing was too peculiar to be shelved outright if it had the possibility of finding a place in one production cut/paste job or another - and a lot of those ideas still stem from the same band who had been evolving their songcraft and were keen to move forward in that respect. The weird industrial dancefloor metal moments and their adlibbed Scatman-riffing ("Nimetön", and maybe the "di-di-di-di-diii-ii-ii-ii-iisco" in "Discoinferno" could count as an eurodance hook too) and the bonkers euroclub-goes-metal homages ("Antroposentrifugi", without a doubt one of the wildest songs CMX have ever released and so ecstatic in its insanity) share spaces with earnest moments of songwriting which clearly stem from the preceding two records. "Aamutähti" is a gentle lullaby decorated with beautiful horn sections and light-as-air backing vocals with only the drum loop giving it that overt Discopolis vibe, "Suljettu astia" is such a normal rock song that it feels awkwardly out of place here, and "Vallat ja väet" rises from the ashes of its noise breakdowns into a heartfelt and longing giant that has the honest strength of a band acknowledging they've made it big time and they're going to ensure it damn well means something, by precision-firing an anthem so sharp and striking it instantly becomes a landmark song for them. They're reminiscent of the peaks of the past two albums - and in terms of "Vallat ja väet" and "Aamutähti" specifically they surpass many of them - but in the vortex of Discopolis they're almost too serious and too focused.

It's a bit of a mess then: a band heading down a clear path, but intentionally disorienting themselves from it. But it's a really good mess, if a bit uneven. Discopolis is a little bit of everything: hilarious (intentionally or unintentionally) and emotional, heavy as hell and still at times incredibly graceful, successfully exploring new concepts as well as sometimes clunkily forcing them down the band's material. But it's always, always memorable and most of the time really interesting and still solidly written underneath the ProTools trickery where you can literally hear the cuts between takes. It is, as expected, a little uneven and if there's a fault to Discopolis it's that its flow is all over the place and in particular that it ends with a whimper: "Epäonnisten liikemiesten helvetti" is mostly just loud and disgruntled huffing-and-puffing which at this stage feels a little regressive, and the sprawling and outro-like "Silmien ummistamisesta Nansenin galvanointiin" is a great guitar hook aimlessly lost in search of an actual song to be in. At least "Arcana" in between is one of the best marriages of machine and man that the album boasts, highlighting that in another timeline Discopolis could've been an incredibly solid industrial rock album, even if sans its quirks. "Jerusalem" too isn't as good as its admittedly impressive choir explosion of a hook would give the impression of, because that choir is the only really memorable part of the song. And if you want an example of how the flow in general feels like a crapshoot, just check out how "Aamutähti" and its skygazing grace follows three of the album's most outrageous songs and it feels like the album abruptly hits the handbrakes each and every time. Discopolis is uneven and all over the place - but it's so often close to genius too.

I can absolutely understand why one person would be over the moon for this album and another would consider it a confusing dip in quality, and boringly I meet the extremes somewhere a little more centrist. Discopolis is as thrilling and inspired as it is an odd duck hinting at a greater potential; whether that'd have been by focusing more on either its earnest or its unhinged qualities, or CMX simply tightening the quality control a little bit more. But even with that caveat, it's still one of CMX's most fascinating albums and in a thoroughly positive way. It nails that unpredictability and askewness that makes up so much of the band's DNA and appeal, which has certainly already made appearances across the past five albums but nowhere so imminently as it has in these brimstone disco floor fillers and whirlwind industrial anthems. After Discopolis CMX would calm down a little and begin their second life as a steadfast and focused rock act, as if they deliberately trapped their excess madness within the confinements of Discopolis; while it's no classic album, it's riveting to peek into its Pandora's box nonetheless.

Rating: 7/10

Magenta Skycode - Relief (2010)

 
1) The Simple Pleasures; 2) Kipling; 3) Night Falls on the Rifle; 4) Sometimes; 5) King of Abstract Painters; 6) Trains Are Leaving the Yard; 7) The Old World; 8) Escaping Outdoors; 9) Montag; 10) We're Going to Climb / Kipling (Reprise)

Moving onto lighter and airier fields from the debut, still scaling grand heights and brimming with melody but more at peace - and more resonant.

Key tracks: "The Simple Pleasures", "Kipling", "Night Falls on the Rifle"

I finished my review for Magenta Skycode's debut IIIII by explaining its power via a quote from the second album, Relief. The opening song of Relief states that "the simple pleasures are always the deepest" and that was the motto why the debut's pop majesty - the moments of melodic bombast with pitch-perfect production, sweeping choruses and majestic peaks - worked so well even though, if you assess it with cold logic, it's hardly a unique album and Jori Sjöroos' flimsy front of a band had the personality of a well equipped studio. Sometimes all you need is just a song that slaps without any greater emotional resonance. The irony of using that quote from Relief is that as far as the two albums go, Relief is the one which actually goes beyond that.

The basic recipe is still as formerly described but in comparison to the stylishly moody IIIII, the blinds have been pulled back and the windows have been opened. The palette for Relief is brighter and airier, and the songs sound more open and positively glow, welcoming the listener in rather than suavely hiding in the dark club corners like the predecessor did. It's an album perfect for the spring: the soundtrack for the world moving on from the dark of winter and the snow melting under the sunshine to reveal patches of green grass coming to life, air filled with a crisp freshness. It's also much less of a 'band' album and it quietly drops the whole rock band pretense of the debut. Sjöroos has a couple of helping hands here (including his PMMP compatriots Paula Vesala and Mira Luoti in blink-and-miss backing vocal roles) but ultimately Relief has the air and aura of a classic multi-talented singer/songwriter/producer's album, where each song is given anything that suits the vibe its creator is trying to pin down and where recreating anything in a live setting is a completely secondary concept. By also moving away from the whole "ordinary band plays stadium songs" shtick, Sjöroos opens up Magenta Skycode's sound to less rigid structures, with sections where there's sometimes little distinction between a build-up and a verse and in fact where entire songs can almost act as dramatic payoffs to prior ones. The Chorus is still the center that everything else seeks towards in order to reach that perfect torchlight waving moment - and Relief has a ton of instantly great moments like that - but how the songs get there now is a different matter. It's probably my highly seasonal associations with this album but the one adjective that always comes to my mind is "natural", as in of nature - the songs play out like a wild growth of instruments and arrangements, in the center of which is a path to the lofty destination.

The new approach unlocks what kept IIIII away from reaching that next, more personal level that was readily in its sights but still beyond its grasp. Relief overall sounds more personal and, well, less like a stylistic experiment of a project and more like a vessel for human expression. Sjöroos' voice is less buried in the mix this time and while he's not necessarily the world's greatest lyricist or a singer, he's so much more confident here than he's ever been before and he soars through Relief with confidence and boldness without hiding himself with production techniques, which adds another layer to the album's overall earnestness and openness. It sounds beautifully at peace and overflowing with personal richness, expressed through these giant arches of melodies and multi-layered arrangements - and for once, Sjöroos' own voice clearly in the middle. It'd be hard to call him anything but a creator without limits (given his multi-project discography) but Relief feels personal and the title feels apt for it, as the weights fall off the shoulder.

As far as the actual songs go, the heavy hitters come up right at the start as Relief doesn't hesitate to start high. "The Simple Pleasures" (quoted earlier) is the big pop song to nail down the album's epic scales right from the beginning and it just gets bigger and bigger with each go-around to more and more majestic results, "Kipling" details the record's more free-flowing creativity with its mantra-like verses (if it's appropriate to call them that) and the sprawling jungle of melodies that wraps around the central shuffling beat that rides the song into the grand horizon, and "Night Falls on the Rifle" adds a touch of darkness from the debut to contrast against the rest of the album's light, eventually revealing its full colours in its harmony-laden chorus that deserves all the repeating it gets. From the opening salvo Relief moves onto a more understated middle section, but letting things calm down a little brings out some of the best qualities of Relief the clearest. The opening trio might be the best songs of the record, but in particular the flow from "King of Abstract Painters" to "Escaping Outdoors" is where all those nature analogies shine the brightest (sometimes literally, "Escaping Outdoors" and all), with an everpresent lush flurry of melodies and extended atmospheric build-ups really invoking that spring morning atmosphere of stepping out into what feels like a new world. They're slightly subtler songs than the big anthem threesome that opens the record, but the melodies are among the album's - and Magenta Skycode's - loveliest and they're honestly the kind of songs you want to wrap yourself into. 

They also resonate, and that's the big thing. IIIII I enjoyed because it's full of bangers (simple as), but Relief actually works its way to me on an emotional level, all to do with those abstract seasonal sensory memories it has despite it actually making little sense (the album was released in October, I got a copy of it in December and my actual memories of it revolve around my time in university in the UK where you just get a weird weather mush that largely blurs together for 12 months instead of clear seasons that would generate seasonal vibes). Even "Montag", the one somewhat ill-fitting song here thanks to its atypically lurching tempo and its melodramatic gothic agony that's at odds with the rest of the album's mood board (from which the grand come-together finale "We're Going to Climb" launches off gloriously), has warmed up to me over the years because it's reached that point where it evokes some actual memories of my university campus that I cherish in my nostalgic rabbit's hole. Thanks to the new approach to songwriting and presentation, the same qualities that won over on IIIII are now able to turn these songs into scenes made out of audio that you can see yourself stepping into, and that vividly atmospheric touch edges it over into a great album. It's a shame that tis where Sjöroos decided to park the project apart from one last EP a few years later: on Relief Magenta Skycode started to turn from one project among others into an artistic vehicle with its own personality, and it would've been interesting to hear where he'd take it from here. 

Rating: 8/10

CMX - Rautakantele (1995)

1) Rautakantele; 2) Yöllisiä; 3) Palvonnan eleitä; 4) Talviunia; 5) Kirosäkeet; 6) Ennustaja; 7) Päivälintu; 8) G; 9) Pelasta maailma; 10) Linnunhammas; 11) Veden ääri; 12) Pirunmaitoa; 13) Hiljaisuuteen

Beautiful songs pushing through a production that tries to stifle them.

Key tracks: "Kirosäkeet", "G," Pelasta maailma"

Aura was a big deal and so a good amount of pressure was always going to be involved when it came time to follow it up, and from the outset Rautakantele looked to be destined to fail. The motivation difficulties that would lead then-drummer Pekka Kanniainen to become an ex-drummer in a few years time became more apparent as Kanniainen struggled to attend writing or practice sessions. Disagreements about the production of the album gave the band the idea to self-produce the record, which didn't go quite according to plan and the band's regret about how the album sounds would become the first thing they’d ever mention when discussing the record. Given the studio time had been booked and the band had plenty of songs in bank they started the recording sessions without their drummer, which meant that most of the material that was recorded leaned towards the softer side of CMX's spectrum - so much so that towards the end of the sessions there were so many doubts within the group about how the album so far had turned out that they quickly recorded a number of songs more in vein with what you'd expect from CMX.

Somehow, through all that, Rautakantele survived. The touch of tenderness and the open embrace of something more graceful that Aura introduced to CMX's sound is followed upon and even emphasised on Rautakantele, through the abysmal production job. The drums are so anemic it makes you wonder if it was a direct snapback to the issues the rest of CMX had with Kanniainen (“Palvonnan eleitä" alone has probably the worst hi-hat sound I’ve ever heard in an actual studio release), the guitars are completely depthless be it acoustic or electric, and everything else is simply so flat this may as well be a 2D release. But the songs bloom through the concrete, and the skeletal sound and the frequent more raw outbursts of volume turn Rautakantele into an album that's both beautiful and ugly at the same time. The troubles that lead to the album are reflected within its tones, with a sense of melancholy and discord across it but through it all, there's a bright warmth that pulls through against the odds reflected in its nonetheless rich arrangements, filled with more playful guitar parts, adventurous vocal lines and a frequently appearing three-piece backing vocalist set whose soft cadence smoothen Yrjänä’s gravel and always become the best part of any song they appear in. Rautakantele like a barren country field in the middle of winter: stark and lifeless, but still picturesque with all the snow over it. 

Much of the album is made out rock songs with serene hearts, where underneath the scarred guitars there's an abundance of strong melodies, and it's at this intersection of heavy and tender where Rautakantele is most often at its best. It’s where you find the anthemic "Kirosäkeet", vulnerable power-ballad-in-making "Talviunia", "Ennustaja" which is awash with playful vocal melodies that beam through and the simply sublime "G" that escalates into a flurry of backing vocal harmonies over one of the band's most - almost spiritually - heavenly choruses. The more traditionally CMX-esque bursts of manic energy like the rhythm-flailing title track and the entertainingly twisted “Palvonnan eleitä” (that speak-song second verse!) support their gentler counterparts and lend the album a surprisingly rapid pace - and even they have a melodic flourish that gives them an airier footing. It all feels - for the first time with CMX - light as air, with none of the pressure behind the scenes detectable; anything but really, as the band has never sounded this effortlessly great.

It is the slow and hymnal heart of Rautakantele that’s become synonymous with the album though, with an intimate touch rare for a CMX album. It's that side which also offers "Pelasta maailma" which became one of CMX's great evergreens shortly after its appearance, and little wonder why. It's a startling song, really, because it's so honest with its romance and peace. No hidden tricks, no cheeky twists: simply a ballad the size of a small personal universe, colouring the night sky with the northern lights in tune with its wistful woodwinds, heartbeat of a drum machine and a genuinely touching vocal performance from Yrjänä and the backing vocalists. "Päivälintu" and "Veden ääri" are more traditional acoustic campfire ballads and are more unarmed than anything the band has recorded before, and "Yöllisiä" even proves that it's possible to mix CMX's erratic whimsy into these new ideas as it topsy-turvies around its strums like a court jester - and then suddenly clearing the table with a moment of quietly touching resonance as the backing vocals begin to gather behind. You even get a literal hymn, “Hiljaisuuteen”, to close the album: a choir piece that has all the holy heavy-heartedness of an actual church song, Yrjänä backed by a multi-head chorus all a cappella who bid a hallow farewell to the album which strikes straight into the heart for this little atheist who grew up in a habitually Christian country. The transition from "Pirunmaitoa" - angry and growling at start but moving into a calmer extended instrumental jam in the way the band enjoyed tiding their albums to the close at the time - isn't perfect, but I'm not sure what exactly could lead flawlessly into "Hiljaisuuteen" either, and as an actual ending it feels just perfect. I don't think I'd ever be able to rank it among my favourite CMX songs as a song, but it's up there with my favourite album closers of theirs, haunting the space long after its brought the disc into its silent end.

“Hiljaisuuteen” is by no means representative of Rautakantele but despite the initial surprise it makes perfect sense for it to exist here. There’s strands of serenity, intimacy and almost spiritual calm throughout the album and after those strands have spent the album wading between rowdy guitars, gentle embraces of melody and a rudimentary production that threatens to strangle the life out of them, a hymn is a natural place for them to gather together. In its own way it makes sense that the band would retreat into a clearer headspace when all four walls around them kept crashing down, and the first thing that comes to my mind from Rautakantele is just how clearly it’s guided by vision, allowing itself to sound so uninhibitedly pretty even if it means shaking away the edge the band had carried - and will go on to carry - with them; to the extent that no matter how long the discography has grown it still remains unique in that extent. The strength of the songwriting and the weakness of the production makes it a strong but wounded album, clearly imperfect but its strengths glow so strongly they sweep away the shadows. If it sounded better maybe it would be an all-time great - and yet in a way its that crippled grace that the record bears which makes it so alluring.

Rating: 8/10

CMX - Aura (1994)

1) Mikään ei vie sitä pois; 2) Sametinpehmeä; 3) Elokuun kruunu; 4) Ruoste; 5) Nainen tanssii tangoa; 6) Turkoosi; 7) Kultanaamio; 8) Raskas; 9) Talvipäivänseisaus; 10) Työt ja päivät; 11) Pilvien kuningas; 12) Aura

More focused and unafraid to be beautiful at times - practically a reinvention for the band, and it's now time to take them seriously.

Key tracks: "Elokuun kruunu", "Ruoste", "Kultanaamio"

I've sometimes seen Aura described as the Finnish OK Computer and while that's a slightly hyperbolic sentiment and the two albums have very little in common musically, there is a seed of truth in there as they do both represent a turn of the tide in the popular pop culture context. Much like Radiohead's epic third album signalled the shift from the bright-eyed optimism of Britpop to the anxiety-exhausted final years of the 1990s in the UK, Aura has become the representative of the shift in Finnish rock music, with the general audiences well and truly adopting the nearly endless wealth of weird rock bands that the late 80s-early 90s Finland was giving birth to. In the wider scheme Aura didn't start the revolution, but it became its face, representing the upgrade from cult success ti actual success for CMX and many of their peers, as all these lyrically adept and musically unique acts who had been bubbling underneath became unlikely radio stars and shaped the Finnish nineties in their own characteristic ways.

The wildest thing about Aura is where it came from. Keep in mind that up to this point CMX were a chaotic group of grizzly Northern men who were always restlessly stirring their own pot, intentionally awkward to adore. They were prog-rockers doing hardcore punk, a band who found it hilarious and thrilling to pervert their hooks with abrupt twists and whose albums ran amok. After a string of three erratic albums each one more unpredictable than before (and not necessarily always in the best way), they were incredibly unlikely heroes to ever get a real break - if they ever even wanted it. CMX were a band in a constant flux, a maelstrom of wild ideas and wilder energy. But they were also talented, ambitious musicians who were growing out of the playpen they had started in and though they had tried to fight change in Aurinko, eventually it became too tempting to resist.

Aura is where CMX took a deep breath and focused. If you want to keep drawing parallels to OK Computer, then Aura bears the same notion of the band putting their heads together to plan for something greater than the sum of its parts, something that would take them to the next level artistically and musically. In Aura's case, that move was allowing ideas to represent themselves calmly and slowly if needed. The old fire hasn’t disappeared: "Sametinpehmeä" is perhaps a bit too much of a throwback to the last two albums that's a little ill-fitting in its current company and only seems to be on the album to remind any old fans right from the start that yes it's still the same CMX, but "Raskas" is just as positively punchy as anything before and the delightfully bonkers tango/heavy metal hybrid "Nainen tanssii tangoa" is fueled by the flashes of complete insanity that was the main characteristic of early CMX. Even the shaman drum jams that were synonymous with the band are still intact as far as actually opening the album, but "Mikään ei vie sitä pois" immediately highlights the changes in the band's songwriting. Unlike all the other previous drum circle anthems it's guided by melody, and rather than just standing out as a weird novelty, it makes not just for an effective intro but stands out as a song in its own right, mystically leading into Aura's world. 

Those familiar throwbacks are largely there to bridge gaps though, and for most of its duration Aura looks both forward and elsewhere entirely. It is a gentler and softer record than the first three, undeniably; but it’s also more expansive and cohesive, and quite frankly more thought-out. Many of the songs are built around acoustic guitars and four tracks - a quarter of the album - are effectively ballads or mood pieces with A.W. Yrjänä's voice in the forefront in a manner it hasn't been before; among them are the elegant and softly spoken “Ruoste” that became the album’s runaway hit and the deceptively beautiful and secretly tragic “Talvipäivänkumous” that's like a light in the middle of the coldest winter night. At the center of it it's CMX embracing the concept that you can create something beautiful with a honest heart, and it opens so many paths for the band across even the harder songs. Arrangements are expanded with more keyboards and most notably a set of strings, which land a central role in every song they turn up in thanks to some sublime string arrangements that are overy and beyond the generic rock band orchestral wallpaper. The band’s prog influences are rising right to the surface as well, with the Pink Floydian “Pilvien kuningas” resting in its keyboard-trodden groove for a good nine minutes as the band lose themselves in the kind of instrumental jamming that they’d shy away from previously. “Elokuun kruunu” and “Kultanaamio” complete the band’s transformation into 90s alternative stars: they're two towering guitar anthems that sound as majestic on the hundredth listen as they do on the first, boldly soaring. "Elokuun kruunu" is fantastic in its own right, showing a little restraint even as it goes for the jugular in its anthemic chorus, but "Kultanaamio" is the album's centrepiece - you can predict right from the simple bass intro that the song is eventually going to explode and when it does, with the string section swooping in from the shadows like a gust of wind that just gave the song's wings flight, it's truly incredible. It's CMX well and truly reincarnated, unafraid to be a little more open towards its listeners but backing that notion up with a melodic abundance that begs to be heard.

As a first for CMX, it's also a set of songs that hold together remarkably. Aura is an album, a statement of intent for CMX's brand new form. It’s exciting in its cohesiveness, how dramatic arcs are built and sustained through several songs, where everything builds up on what appeared before. “Mikään ei vie sitä pois” and “Sametinpehmeä” bridge the gap from the past to the present, “Elokuun kruunu” reveals the band’s new more elegant side, “Ruoste” digs deeper into that and introduces the strings, “Nainen tanssii tangoa” incorporates those strings in something more conventional for the band, et cetera. They're also, for the most, part great songs. There's a few that truly make a stand - "Elokuun kruunu", "Kultanaamio", "Ruoste", "Talvipäivänseisaus" - but the overall flow is not only cohesive, but consistent. There was a lot of potential as well as flashes of greatness across the past three albums, but it's like it finally clicked for the band themselves what exactly those moments were, and they've removed the chaff around them. There's grace, there's fury and there's a constant sense of surprise and excitement, and it's not easy to understand why this album in particular lifted CMX on a pedestal. For me personally Aura is a few small steps away from being a truly classic album, but it is still undeniable in so many ways.

Rating: 8/10

Lambchop - How I Quit Smoking (1995)

1) For Which We Are Truly Thankful; 2) The Man Who Loved Beer; 3) The Militant; 4) We Never Argue; 5) Life's Little Tragedy; 6) Suzieju; 7) All Smiles and Mariachi; 8) The Scary Caroler; 9) Smuckers; 10) The Militant (Reprise); 11) Garf; 12) Your Life as a Sequel; 13) Theöne; 14) Again

This is where Lambchop set their form, and if you're familiar with that form you'll already know exactly what to expect. In good and bad.

Key tracks: "We Never Argue", "Suzieju", "Theöne"

The Lambchop formula, if you will, finds its footing here. Their first album saw Kurt Wagner and his gang with one foot in alt country and one foot in slacker-esque alt rock, and now the weight's started to shift towards the former. "Americana" is arguably a better descriptor than country through: Lambchop doesn't really have the twang of a country act, but the sweeping strings, smooth orchestration and quiet acoustic murmurs all have their roots in the vintage American songbook, which Wagner interprets through his own peculiar personality traits. Lambchop albums differ by tiny factors usually detectable only by seasoned veterans of the band's music, and on How I Quit Smoking that factor is the mere act that it lays down the tracks for the next two decades. The influence of the first album is still deep in the album's psyche, though. You know how on early 90s alternative rock or indie rock albums you've got that one much slower song - sometimes with strings - that isn't really a ballad but more of an introspective moment of calm that's there to balance the album's flow? Imagine an entire album of those back to back, just remove the excess rock artistry from the equation (I can’t imagine this was a particularly exciting time to be a drummer for Lambchop, for example).

In general though, if you know Lambchop you know how this goes. Wagner mutters surrealist everyday vignettes (which often elicit a genuine chuckle), the tempo barely ever goes beyond calmly trodding ("All Smiles and Mariachi" is the only uptempo number here and I use that term extremely loosely) and overall it all goes on for a little too long while sounding a little too similar throughout, but it's nonetheless all very pleasant to listen to. How I Quit Smoking isn’t really about the power of songcraft or individual set pieces, it’s one long sustained mood where barely anything happens unless you view it through a microscope. At their most Lambchoppiest the band's music can get downright samey, and How I Quit Smoking is what you'd point towards as a solid example of that. It sets the band's norms but because of that, it also doesn't tinker around with them like some of the later albums do and so it is particularly one-note. Its charms are practically passive, the songs more of a mindset and a moodscape that present themselves without causing a stir - but if you're in a Lambchop mood it works wonder. That near-perfect collaboration between mood and music is likely why there are so many people who like this band, including me - sometimes there's no other music that would work better than Wagner's quiet grace. 

Nonetheless, to give How I Quit Smoking some credit of its own there are a few particular pieces of excellence that do stand out. "We Never Argue", "Life's Little Tragedy" and "Suzieju" forms the album's charmingly swooning core, full to their brim with the kind of elegance that would become more familiar across some albums down the line. "We Never Argue" also presents the album's catchiest vocal melody and the flute hook of "Suzieju" is the musical equivalent, so they're the bops of the record if you will, if that makes a difference. "Theöne" is a superlatively beautiful string-laden number which ends the record with an honestly touching way, with "Again" serving as its quick all-strings reprise to officially close things down. Those aren't the only parts of the album that jump out, but they're the notable ones in a sea of gentle guitar melodies, Wagner's murmur and barely-there percussion hits from one song to another, some of which are nicer than others. The only real point of criticism is that "The Militant" doesn't need to appear twice, because even if the "reprise" version has a different tone to the first version and so arguably justifies its existence, it's still the same song and bloats a tracklist that already feels like a dragging Sunday afternoon at times.

Otherwise though, unless you're insistent on listening to things chronologically (or you feel particularly inspired by this review to listen to this out of the blue, in which case, why?) by the time you get to this album you know the drill, and you'll likely have accepted it already. Lambchop have done better albums - many genuinely great - and then they've done albums like How I Quit Smoking that offer exactly what you expect and which works exactly how you'd like it to. Regardless of whether it's actually a truly memorable album is almost a moot point - it's comfortably Wagnerian at its most base form.

Rating: 6/10