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