1) Valoruumis; 2) Etuvartio; 3) En tahdo nähdä enää yhtään alastonta; 4) Luotisuora; 5) Nrsisti; 6) Kusimyrsky; 7) Rikkisuudeltu; 8) Me tulemme kaikkialta; 9) Jyrsijä; 10) Seitsentahokas
Loud and brash but with nothing to say.
Key tracks: "En tahdo nähdä enää yhtään alastonta", "Kusimyrsky", "Seitsentahokas"
Seitsentahokas didn't arrive in this world easily. The original sessions were pushed back by a year when A.W. Yrjänä's home was broken into and, among many other things, the thieves had taken the early sketches for CMX's next album. After Yrjänä had taken a long break to recover and the band reconvened the following year, everyone disagreed about the new songs - guitarist Halmkrona infamously walked out of the session in frustration. Once everyone had calmed down and found a mutual ground to continue from, drummer Tuomas Peippo's other work outside the band meant that he wouldn't be able to invest as much time as everyone else, and conscious that this would mean yet more delays perhaps for the foreseeable future, the other three men decided that it would be easier to let him go. A friend of the band Olli-Matti Wahlström was recruited as a session drummer and after the tour was formally signed on as the new drummer, but officially Seitsentahokas was the first time since 1990's debut Kolmikärki that CMX had recorded an album as a three-piece
Whether by coincidence or not, Seitsentahokas became the oft-dreaded "back to basics" album. In order to bring the band back closer together, the record's chosen conept was to not include anything extra beyond what the four members (including whoever would be behind the drum kit) could muster together in one room. Two guitars, bass, drums and vocals and that's it; the credits section for the album is blunt and minimal, a sharp contrast to the more involved sound of the band's past decade. To give CMX credit where it's due, rather than succumb to attempts of replicating their old sound Seitsentahokas is stylistically still a continuation of where the band were overall in the early 2010s, with one foot in their imperial phase prog/metal/alternative hybrid and another in the more straightforward direction heralded by the preceding Iäti.
And it's... fine. The simpler sound world isn't actually something that particularly jumps out, primarily because there are still songs that sound complex enough to effectively distract from it - the eight-minute prog goblin "Kusimyrsky" ("Piss Storm", released as the lead single so the message was clear that this wouldn't be another easy radio record like Iäti) and the sprawling and tangled title track in particular sound like there's a lot more going on under the hood than there actually turns out to be. The sound is remarkably stuffed in fact: the two guitars fill each other's gaps and the bass is deep and steely and murmurs constantly underneath - it's so strongly in the mix in fact that it has a noticable physical reverbation through my room during select parts of the album where it growls the loudest.. Seitsentahokas is a berserker ready for war, with CMX hellbent on showing that they're not going to be pushed around by what temporary setbacks fate has thrown at their feet - it's an angry battering ram going full speed directly towards the listener for nearly its entire length.
But the noise it makes is a fleeting distraction from the obvious signs that the difficult labour period didn't leave the album unscathed. Seitsentahokas charges in straight like a missile perhaps at least partially because the band are baring their teeth against all odds, but maybe more likely because the less adventurous material got discarded along the way - perhaps in the burglary (and everyone who's ever written something long knows that you can never re-achieve the magic of the first version you accidentally deleted and forgot to save) but also because the band's now-gone online biography directly referenced the first batch of material as "too strange". Thus, the straightforward and angry songs survived, whether it was to blow off steam or because they were the only demos that everyone agreed on. But despite the energy and underneath all that muscular power they showcase, they're just not very memorable songs. Nothing Seitsentahokas displays is anything the band hasn't done before and excelled at so the direction isn't at fault, the material is simply indistinguishably monotonous. Half this record beats around the same notes and though there's a fleeting rush of adrenaline that the songs provide, it's not enough to actually remember how they go afterwards. And then there's "Jyrsijä", which has such an irritating chorus that I wish I could include it in the blur batch of songs I have no recollection of.
The proof of the material's mundanity is that the bulk of the album's better songs aren't even necessarily particularly great tracks; they just do things differently enough that in this ten-song context they have a far more positive imprint than they otherwise would. "Nrsisti" begins like any other song on this album but the swervingly melodic and soaring chorus is so shimmery and light that it sounds genius against the general backdrop; the solemn ballad "Rikkisuudeltu" pulls off the same trick with its more gracefully melodic pace, even if its overwroughtness wouldn't be a part of the upper echelon on any other CMX album. "En tahdo nähdä enää yhtään alastonta" is a little too long and repetetive but its shambling weight and dynamic shifts (from murky to brutal to almost jubilant even if still quite grim) are refreshing even after just two songs. Even the mighty "Kusimyrsky" which once stood as the album's tall central column, spitting and growling everywhere as it tears through time signatures and shouts out perverse oneliners (the chorus' "flow over me" is the obvious thing here, but the concluding full stop of "trust in the number, yourself and the holy geometry" is my favourite), is no longer the highlight it used to be even if it's still one of the more exciting songs on the album thanks to how it's one of the few moving askew rather than directly ahead. It just could be more.
Fortunately the title track leans all-in on that and saves what it can of the album. "Seitsentahokas" is its titular album's brightest star, imploding further into itself with each weird breakdown or murmury verse, guided deeper by the deliciously metallic bass, and when its coil does unwind it bursts forward with a real rush that almost comes across as anthemic. It's the proggiest song on the entire record and I'm not meaning to imply that in order to succeed CMX must be weird and indecipherable - but it helps because that's the strength they've been operating on for nearly almost all their imperial phase albums in the decade just gone prior to this. They certainly do that better than they do charging ahead recklessly. In its last song Seitsentahokas finally finds its footing and itself and even if it's a little too late, it's finally something. Imagine a whole album filled with these dry and deranged creatures like "Kusimyrsky" and "Seitsentahokas". Just imagine.
But that's not the album we have in our hands in reality. The funny thing is that when Seitsentahokas was originally released, I was thoroughly thrilled by it - Iäti had left me a little disappointed and I ended up having a honeymoon phase with this album, thinking it was such a strong return to form. The reason I remember this at all is because I wrotea shoddy but glowing first impressions review on the scrappy little music blog I had at the time and to my shock and surprise CMX themselves linked to it on their Twitter feed - one of the few fleeting moments of wider visibility I've achieved with my ramblings. And then I completely forgot about the album for many, many years; in fact, I think I've listened to this more in the past couple of weeks preparing for this review than I have in a decade. The result of my archaeological dig is that I've found... a lot of nothing in particular, apart from a growing appreciation for "Seitsentahokas" the song itself. And when this review is done, Seitsentahokas will likely return to its place in the shelf and stay there for another long break. It's not bad or even boring so much as it is completely uneventful: it's an album centered around the belief that volume equals personality and sheer power means a song is interesting, and then fails to back that claim up. Even my scoring is clinical, because I've given Iäti a 6 and because it has more real standout songs than this has, Seitsentahokas has to be a notch lower. I would say it's staggering how run of the mill this is despite how it really tries not to be but that would be indicate an actual emotional reaction to the record. In hindsight, it's really obvious here that CMX had waded deeper into the creative rut that defines these years in their history.
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