CMX - Aion (2003)

1) Pirunnyrkki; 2) Sielunvihollinen; 3) Melankolia; 4) Fysiikka ei kestä; 5) Palvelemaan konetta; 6) Kuoleman risteyksestä kolme virstaa pohjoiseen; 7) Kyyn pimeä puoli; 8) Sivu paholaisen päiväkirjasta; 9) Nahkasiipi; 10) Ensimmäinen saattaja; 11) Hautalinnut

Where everything so far has lead to. The apex of it all - heavy, bold and stunning.

Key tracks: "Sielunvihollinen", "Palvelemaan konetta", "Kuoleman risteyksestä kolme virstaa pohjoiseen"

By this point CMX had started to operate on a cycle of reactions and counter-reactions, each album indirectly acting as the opposite of what came before thanks to the band continuously looking for new challenges. Aion follows suite, and thus after the pick-n-mix Isohaara comes something focused - terrifyingly focused.

Aion is a loose concept album with the running lyrical theme of inherent evil everywhere - spiritual, human, literal or metaphorical. That's where the terrifying from the previous paragraph comes in, as that shadow seeps through its every crook and corner. Aion creeps like it's constantly foreshadowing something moving from the deep any moment now, like it's preceding the final days and we don't even know it. It's not a dark album - there's enough light around its shades - but it's heavy and foreboding. Its walls of sound tower high above and come crashing down, one showman-like centrepiece song at a time. The wry sense of humour CMX usually carry around them is nearly absent here, and the stern attitude found in its place enforces the idea of the band knowing they were onto something important and for once in their lifetime they took it dead seriously. The album's only real moment of levity is the atypically rhyme-happy chorus to the lead single "Melankolia", which rise from the ominously bubbling verses into a delirious singalong romp. But even its cheeriness is more akin to a madman's laugh

Aion's actual legacy as one chapter in the great tome of CMX's journey is that this is the pinnacle of it all, the crossroads where everything meets and the rest shoots out from. Aion wouldn't exist without the three albums before it, the trilogy of development following the band's creative reboot: the raw power of Vainajala, the progressive layers of Dinosaurus Stereophonicus and the experimental freedom of Isohaara are all parts of Aion's DNA. Following the line-up shuffle in 1997 CMX had reinvented themselves as a muscular rock band with a pronounced lean towards all things weird and "artsy", and the five years afterwards were really the band learning to fly again in ways they hadn't thought before. The tangled tendrils of Aion is the sum of the lessons learned, brought together with a single-minded concentration that the nature of the previous albums didn't lend to. The result is a record that not only peaks the evolution that had taken place but it distills CMX as a musical entity, as much as you are able to sum them up anyway; you can hear traces of Aion in every album since, just as the discography so far leads to it piece by piece. There's very few cases I've come across that are as clear definitions of a magnum opus for a group as Aion is to CMX.

The body of Aion is CMX at their heaviest to date. It's not like the former hardcore punks have ever shied away from coming across hard, but with the muscular riff-lead guitar work and Peippo's fiercely technical powerhouse drumming Aion is often ramming through with bulldozer force. The producer has changed from one long-time collaborator Gabi Hakanen to future long-time collaborator Illusion Rake, and Rake taps onto the dynamics of the band's playing more than the texturally-oriented Hakanen did, and it suits this new incarnation of the band. On top of the lead-weight volume CMX layer additional ideas that run through the album tying the songs together: time signature flickers that throw curveballs throughout ("Palvelemaan konetta" taking it as far as it can by restlessly shifting in its skin while still going full steam ahead), sudden swells of string orchestras that descend onto the songs with near-violent bombast, and the appropriately haunting atmospheric passages providing the occasional respite. It's these that offer the album's most diverse outings: the cold steel dread of "Sivu paholaisen päiväkirjasta", the hopeless march of "Viimeinen saattaja", the circling percussion of "Hautalinnut" which closes the album like a rushed exorcism, and the resurfacing of synth-CMX with the ghostly electronic shimmer of "Sielunvihollinen". "Sielunvihollinen" is a heck of a thing to drop as the second track, especially after the wrecking ball opener "Pirunnyrkki" that rolls through the speakers with no warning. The sudden dead halt slowdown to "Sielunvihollinen"'s ambient murmur is the real start to Aion, the rug pull that drops you to the middle of the album's concept, from where you then try to find your way and emerge song by song afterwards. It's chillingly eery and yet beautiful in its wistfulness, and in its strangeness it's one of the key pieces of the record.

Therein lies Aion's card in sleeve: its cohesiveness and how well it all works together. CMX are consistent but rarely in sound, their albums guided by their oddball sense of direction which finds them frequently taking side tracts that make their own weird kind of sense in ethos, but which most of the time leave the albums as "just" really solid collections of songs. Aion makes sense as a whole entity, even when it diverges from the general path. Its songs stand strong by themselves - even "Sielunvihollinen" and the palate cleansing "Kyyn pimeä puoli" with its Up-era R.E.M. textures - and throughout the record you are treated to some of the best CMX there is. "Melankolia" is the token single that pulls you in but doesn't lose any of the album's core identity with its hooks, "Fysiikka ei kestä" is aching, enormous and yet almost oppressively crushing, "Sivu paholaisen päiväkirjasta" is so tightly wound and constructed that it doesn't sound something a human being could have written, "Palvelemaan konetta" is both brutal and giddily pogoing at the same time. "Kuoleman risteyksestä kolme virstaa pohjoiseen" was considered by Yrjänä at one point the finest song CMX had ever written and it has every right to that title, sharply slithering between frigid acoustic passages and electronically distorted outbursts until the strings rise and fierily engulf over everything, the song burning to the sound of heavy guitars and orchestras: an anthem, but not as we know it. But these songs are still even more fearsome together as part of one pack, with the album's dramatic curves moving through multiple songs at a time. As impressive as the individual moments are, Aion's allure is in the whole journey to its abyss.

It's a superlative review with no ifs and buts, simply because it's an awe-striking album. Aion is CMX perfecting their trick and revealing their hand to clear out the table, in one frightening and dominant move. They never bettered it but they probably even couldn't have if they had wanted to - it's a lightning striking in one place for enough time to conjure together an album that doesn't sound like it was created or written, but that it had always existed somewhere in the universe and then it leaked into our reality through some arcane means. It's a bold and hefty record that everything so far has lead to, and it stands fearsomely tall.

Rating: 9/10

I've Made Too Much Pasta - Swear I Saw Your Mouth Move (2017)

1) Fleas; 2) Raccoon Song; 3) Evil Boys and Evil Girls; 4) Never Ending Thirst; 5) I Had a Great Time in the Trash; 6) I Would Eat the Moon; 7) Macaroni and Disease; 8) The World's Not Big Enough for the Both of Us; 9) God of Outer Space; 10) Maybe We Can Steal Our Neighbors' Cable; 11) Lemurs in the Walls; 12) Ferret Without Any Whiskers

An abundance of vocal harmonies and passion project energy - who know raccoons were such great songwriters?

Key tracks: "Macaroni and Disease", "Maybe We Can Steal Our Neigbors' Cable", "Ferret Without Any Whiskers"

In my completely sincere opinion, one of the most exciting ‘indie’ scenes happening right now (early 2020s, if you're reading this much later on) isn’t found in the persistently cool New York clubs or in Northern English factory towns, but within the borderless world of the furry fandom. The growth in recent years of what now falls under the vague ‘furry music’ umbrella has been a joy to witness, given that for the longest time the fandom's taste in music was practically synonymous with bedroom dance jams of various (and often dubious) quality. This past half a decade, though, has seen an influx of various styles of songwriters with cartoon animal personas rise from the fandom almost overnight, and there's a particularly strong subset of those musicians who seek their inspiration from early 90s alternative rock and singer/songwriters, and often the weirder side of that in particular. Many of those artists also go on to support others, with everyone collaborating and bringing their unique flairs into each other's music. It's like an offbeat version of the Elephant 6 collective - except with a chance of someone actually being an elephant this time. It’s a genuinely exciting scene of wildly talented individuals and promising upcomers, flying completely under the radar of most people.

I'm not necessarily saying that Swear I Saw Your Mouth Move is going to convert anyone to believe me just like that - for one, it still operates on a distinctly furry aesthetic that some less imaginative people are automatically repelled by - but it is one of the most charming and personality-abundant releases in the "scene" it's in, and an overall good representative of the sounds so much of this fuzzy invasion leans in on and what makes it such a fun movement to follow. I’ve Made Too Much Pasta - AKA lead figure Scurrow and his changing group of companions, on this record primarily the fandom superstar Pepper Coyote and the stalwart patron of furry music Bob Drake - play their ramshackle pop songs with big nods towards They Might Be Giants and R.E.M., thrown in a blender with Tiny Toons and run through a filter of creative eccentricity that makes that combination their own. There's an accordion serenade about eating the moon, a jubilant punk anthem about moldy food in the fridge, a stadium singalong celebrating stealing cable and a snappy slacker rock cut about two giant monsters beating the hell out of eachother, among other half-neurotic, half-charismatic stories and anecdotes ostensibly sung by a rabid raccoon. It's surreal and it's cartoony, but the music itself is backed by serious conviction and fuelled by the grassroots conviction of turning daydreams into something real. It's fun and at times funny too, but it takes itself seriously and has audible passion behind it.

There's a lot of great, neat detail to Swear I Saw Your Mouth Move. The songwriting is obviously a big thing, and Scurrow knows how to write a great hook. That knack more specifically shines in his vocal melodies. The lyrics are full of witty turns of phrases and so many of the utterances and anecdotes are hooks on their own thanks to how they're sung, with the carefully tethered manic energy looping through effectively sharp melodies. The songs themselves are all dressed up in a mid-fi, lackadaisical raccoon-core sound that nods towards its inspirations without ever really revealing a clear bridge to them (which in a roundabout way means that Pasta's sound is their own), but it's an eclectic set of tracks behind the aesthetics. Quirky solo cuts like the opener "Fleas" (with its brief organ coda being the album's first twist of many) pave way to full-blown trashcan bubblegum pop ("Raccoon Song", "Evil Boys and Evil Girls")  and parallel dimension cartoon musical interludes ("I Would Eat the Moon", "God of Outer Space"). Beef up "Maybe We Can Steal Our Neighbors' Cable" a little and you'd have an alternative rock single that would've slotted just perfectly in an MTV rotation in 1992: by the time it gets to the handclaps and crowd vocals you've got a rock solid anthem at your hands. 

The secret weapon of the album lies in its backing vocal arrangements, though. From the joyous rush of voices in "Macaroni and Disease" to Pepper flexing his a cappella arrangement skills in "Ferret Without Any Whiskers", the album is full of voices wondrously hollering and harmonising, accentuating hooks and highlighting melodies. They contribute a great deal to the album's joie de vivre and overall energy, balancing between a communal band jam atmosphere and meticulously planned vocal orchestral flourishes. The aforementioned "Ferret Without Any Whiskers" is particularly incredible all around - it's the closer that turns the album upside down and suddenly reveals a level of vulnerability that the rest intentionally avoids - and it's overall one of the album's very finest in music with those dreamworld parade breakdowns, the lyrics and the suddenly emotionally spitting delivery of them. But it's the rich vocal harmonies that make it a grand stand-out, haunting behind the lead vocals throughout until echoing alone through the instrumental bridge in a moment of brief but powerful poignancy. As a backing vocal junkie I'm always so excited to encounter an album that revels in them, and it's a big part why I've latched onto Swear I Saw Your Mouth Move so much.

There's this search for the Holy Grail that many music geeks seek to take, where they hope to find something that sparks with greatness that many others haven't yet found; as if you're uncovering a hidden treasure that speaks just for you. The furry music scene right now is the most consistent place in which I keep tapping into that high, and Swear I Saw Your Mouth Move is there at the forefront of discovery for me. It's endured as a set of charismatic and potent - sometimes surprisingly so - songs that have become a fixed part of the listening routine, which have burrowed their way into parts of my head where they live rent free and pop out without warning at frightening frequency. It's a delightful, inspired debut speaking with its very own voice I'm not hearing much elsewhere

Bonus points for the wonderful CD packaging, with a fun lyrics booklet and a full comic detailing the titular character's (yes, I've Made Too Much Pasta is a character name) backstory. It all adds to the labour of love charm of the album.

Rating: 8/10