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!
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
No comments:
Post a Comment