CMX - Talvikuningas (2007)

1) Kaikkivaltias; 2) Resurssikysymys; 3) Pretoriaanikyborgit; 4) Vallan haamut; 5) Tähtilaivan kapteeni; 6) Kosmologisen vakion laulu; 7) Parvatin tietäjä; 8) Punainen komentaja; 9) Langennut valo; 10) Quanta; 11) Rusalkai; 12) Kaikkivaltiaan peili

They've gone mad, haven't they? On the positive side, they've gone mad and unleashed an once-in-a-lifetime creature.

Key tracks: "Kaikkivaltias", "Vallan haamut", "Punainen komentaja"

I don't think anyone had CMX recording a sci-fi prog rock opera crossed on their bingo cards, did they?

Let's lay some context down here first. The saga of Talvikuningas had been brewing in the background and on A.W. Yrjänä's mind for years before its eventual ascend. Yrjänä - who by this point had become an active writer and author outside his rock band day job - had been quietly plotting a grand science fiction epic in secret for years, fleshing out the world and the story in his spare time. Sometimes these ideas sneakily rose to the surface and if you've ever wondered why science fiction terminology had become an infrequent but regular occurrence in the post-2000s CMX work, it's because Yrjänä had been writing poetry set in the world of his pet project and sometimes these verses became songs and the songs then retrospectively became early seedlings of Talvikuningas, retrospectively and canonically confirmed to tie into the main story. Most of this poetry remained unreleased though, until the band's court producer of the time Rake Eskolin/Illusion Rake discovered it by happenstance and encouraged Yrjänä to turn it into an album. And the band thought why not - they were riding their musical peak wave and in their search for new ways of approaching the now-regular album writing process, creating an interconnected concept album seemed like a new kind of challenge. Albeit a mad one, and not one their label was particularly thrilled about - the band only got the permission to release the album if the initial edition was an overpriced deluxe box set to cover some of the costs without a catchy lead single in place to secure the usual level of success.

Talvikuningas isn't a straightforward narrative either, it makes you work for it. Its story is non-chronological, told through third party view points and unreliable narrators, swamped with conflicting details and spanning centuries in its timespan. Each song represents a particular written piece in the album's mythology, from military march songs to religious chronicles and cryptic scribblings on wall reliefs. "Kosmologisen vakion laulu" near the center is the only song which explicitly happens somewhere in the reality of the timeline and the bulk of it references the other writings in the other songs like an archivist going through his sources. Go through it all with a fine comb and you can start to decipher excerpts of the story of Maltan Hiram, a cyborg soldier fighting in an endless war in a distant galaxy who rises in ranks to become the fearsome Scarlet Commander, turns his back on his immortal King and his creators soon afterwards, gathers his own forces and brings an end to the dominion that he once served. There's gaps in the story, no real clarity who exactly the titular Winter King/Talvikuningas is and the overall story isn't so much a novel as it is a scattering of ancient tomes in a vast library that you are trying to trace from what actually happened.

It's dense and so is the music. The combination of alternative rock melodies, prog unpredictability and light metal flourishes that CMX have adopted as their own is present as it has been for the last couple of albums, but everything is just so much more impenetrably thick. Everything segues together as intended as "one long song" and so the frequently extensive and expansive songs change tracts and tones at the drop of a beat, peppered with leitmotifts, tracks within tracks, time signatures are a free game, etc. The music - atypically composed for the lyrics rather than the other way around, and in the intended running order - carries the story as much as the words do by accentuating and highlighting the dramatic up- and downlifts. Based on some reviews from non-Finnish speaking sources I've read, it seems like CMX have pulled that off well with people being able to "understand" the pace of the narrative at the very least through the music alone. And understanding the lyrics might just make the songs even more impenetrable because they are first and foremost prose that happens to rhyme and at times Yrjänä's litanies are as high and lofty as the music. 

It's impressive. Chaotic, mad and hard to approach, but by golly is it impressive. Talvikuningas is a record that brings awe just by its very existence and how it's been presented. It's an album that demands multiple careful listens simply because there's too much to take on in one go, and what's there isn't the most immediate. It's a colossus of a record that isn't concerned about radio singles or crowd pleasers, it's an insular scribe zealously devoted to its narrative. There are hooks to grab onto, they're just weaved into the greater whole almost as a byproduct rather than as the leading thought behind the songwriting. Much of Talvikuningas refuses to stand comfortably outside its context and parts of it are absolutely present simply to tie connections together (still can't recollect what "Quanta" sounds like if I'm not listening to the song, and I've heard this album countless times). 

And, well, they don't need to either. Talvikuningas is one of the few times a band has talked about how they consider their album as a single song (split into multiple tracklist entries for convenience) and it actually makes sense, and isn't just referring to a number of perfectly individual songs with quaint crossfades connecting them together. Nor are Talvikuningas' 12 songs just a single entity obviously either, but the intent is there: that this is a single piece of work intended to be treated as such, and when you do experience it like that you appreciate the best. The moments of serenity and intensity compliment eachother in ways like the perfect bridge connects together an incredible verse and chorus, the denseness of it all becomes practically rewarding when you start connecting the finer touches with the repeating melodies and lyrical callbacks, and the epic finale of "Talvikuninkaan peili" is genuinely hair-raising because it serves as the explosive coda to everything that came before. There are many incredible sections within Talvikuningas' depths: the Pedot-esque atmospherics of "Vallan haamut" that are interspersed with breakdowns each more out-there than the one before (the sudden vocal harmonies, the abrupt twiddly guitar cut...), the suddenly surged choruses of "Kosmologisen vakion laulu" that ride on Peippo's brisk drums, the towering choruses(??) on "Parvatin tietäjä", to name a few. But I have to actively go through the tracks making notes to actually remember which particular designated section those parts belong to, because of how the album keeps transforming within its confinements while also keeping a tight focus on each interconnecting piece working as part of the greater whole.

Of course there are songs that stand completely and proudly on their own two feet; they're just not the focus and you don't really come to long for them either because Talvikuningas demands to be listened whole. But as they do appear, they're ambitious and thrilling. The glorious multi-part opener "Kaikkivaltias" is one of CMX's finest compositions, introducing the Talvikuningas signature riff which quickly becomes the band's number one headbanger moment and then navigates through individual instrument breakdowns, multiple build-ups with respective pay-offs and its own majestic ending before the album's even had a chance to fully start. "Punainen komentaja" was the reluctant single and it is by far the most instant track on the record, the distinctive double-bass drum barrage of the verses paving way to the album's catchiest chorus; and if you want more proof of just how well-crafted this album is, it's in how the band turn "and he knows the secrets of the Rings of Schwarzschild" into a strong singalong melody. "Tähtilaivan kapteeni" stands out by way of its singular focus in its deep space melancholy, acting as the breather section of the album that gives you a second to reflect what's come before and brace for the next run of songs - it's most gracefully melodic song on the album, which otherwise isn't too fussed about that particular facet of the band's music.

Even in a discography full of strange ducks, Talvikuningas is still the most idiosyncratic. It's CMX at their most uncompromising, quite literally: it acts and sounds like a passion project created solely to cater its creators' whims with their full belief and love behind it, with its potential reception outside its creative bubble considered completely irrelevant. The actual reception split half-and-half, between those who got absorbed wholly into its world and found it a revelation and those who were left completely cold by the very same things others felt passionately drawn to. The truth is... that it's great but not among their best, as predictably middling of an opinion that is? It's a one-of-a-kind event that in its ethos I think any artist should strive for at least once in their lifetime - that pure creative, isolated and unfiltered freedom from any expectations, purely focused on realising the most ambitious ideas of its creator. It's also an impenetrable colossus that demands you to be receptive for it, lest it leaves you completely cold. It's not CMX's best written album in terms of the strength of its songs, but it also feels like that's judging it on the wrong scale because the point here isn't a handful of bangers in a row. It's the presentation of a singular hour-long piece, split into twelve distinct sections for sure but bound so tightly together that there's no point in splitting them. It's a hell of an epic thing and while it's not among my top tier of CMX, it's the one album of theirs that still leaves me in awe the most.

Rating: 8/10

The Shins - Wincing the Night Away (2007)

1) Sleeping Lessons; 2) Australia; 3) Pam Berry; 4) Phantom Limb; 5) Sealegs; 6) Red Rabbits; 7) Turn on Me; 8) Black Wave; 9) Spilt Needles; 10) Girl Sailor; 11) A Comet Appears

The Shins expand their sound and give more space for their signature melodies to grow in. This is what they had been building for and now it's here and it's wonderful.

Key tracks: "Phantom Limb", "Turn on Me", "A Comet Appears"

The bubbling synths that open "Sleeping Lessons" are forever ingrained in my head. It was the first song - I think - I heard from The Shins, when the reviews for Wincing the Night Away were doing rounds and one of them helpfully contained a link to the song; for whatever reason that opening brings that era of my life into my mind so tightly, more than anything else on this record. The whimsically dreamy start to the song is a fun red herring though, because shortly after the song explodes into one of The Shins' most rollicking, hectic bangers. The song grows into full bloom, and listened to in retrospect after I had become familiar with The Shins' other albums, the band themselves did the same on Wincing the Night Away.

The longest ever running joke with The Shins is how they're going to CHANGE YOUR LIFE and it's so, so boring to repeat at this stage (even though I've referenced it myself, as if bound by law), but hearing "Sleeping Lessons" and then later on the full album really did have an impact, albeit a lesser one. Wincing the Night Away was among the first American indie albums I remember getting really acquainted with after spending most of the 2000s fixated on Britrock and my neighbouring Nordic regions, and it was a breath of brand new air in its whimsy, splendour and lushness. As much as it's a time capsule for me (a good half the album's worth of songs bring back some really vivid memories of certain places I happened to hear them in), the truth is it's only gotten better with age, even if perhaps unfairly so as I now get to compare it to other Shins albums. In 2021 as I write this, I own all The Shins albums that have been released so far and that's solely thanks to this album; and even if most of those records have been diminishing returns or have only carried brief glimpses of what I fell in love with here, I keep obediently following Mercer because at one point in his lifetime, he made these ten songs (eleven, if you really want to count "Pam Berry" that's technically a chopped off intro) and that's enough to make me a devotee. 

From a chronological perspective Wincing the Night Away is everything the first two albums ever promised about The Shins, and everything it does is something that they'd be compared to forevermore - it well and truly establishes The Shins, gives them their final form. James Mercer and co are still firmly stood in their old indie pop grounds and the evolutionary line from Oh, Inverted World to here is crystal clear, but on the other hand Mercer's yearning for a more produced, layered sound is starting to gain real territory here. Hence, the instrumentation isn't limited to just twee keyboards and the occasional horn or violin flourish on top of the traditional band quartet set: the credits lists synthesizers, a bouzouki, a dulcimer, MIDI programming and a cat piano (!?), among other instruments. Most of these were also played by Mercer himself, as he's starting to show more explicitly that The Shins were his project through and through, something that he'd declare in all capital letters come next album. Here though, he hits the sweet spot between the two approaches. The songs are lush and vibrant, but they still have that intimate, homegrown feel that was so charming about the first two albums, as well as this one. And besides, every little extra element is there only in service of The Melody.

 
The Melody is the king here. Mercer is incredible and relentless in how he creates the most addictive, hook-heavy melodies both with his voice and instruments, and they all sound perfectly natural and effortless like they just blossomed into existence instead of being meticulously engineered to be weapons of mass affection. Shaking away the basement band aesthetics of the first two albums has only increased his power, because now those melodies are engaged with flourishing, rich arrangements, which act as highlighters and underliners for said melodies. "Phantom Limb" and "Turn on Me" are two of the best songs Mercer's written so far - and honestly probably ever will - and they're deeply layered in a stream of hooks and signature melodies one after another. "Phantom Limb" is even indulgent about it, closing off with a long wordless sing-along of vocal harmonies that's the perfect cherry on top of the song's irresistable run; "Turn on Me" meanwhile doesn't need such tricks to assert its dominance, as that bullseye chorus is more than enough (and the Y-O-U hook is somehow both obvious and ingenius at the same time). The sugar-bouncy "Australia" that constantly tries to one-up itself and the more calm and collected but none less lush "Girl Sailor", placed perfectly in the tracklist to break tension where it's needed, aren't too far behind either. These songs are such a celebration of songcrafts, smarts and arrangement magic, and they're pure joy.

The other added benefit of The Shins expanding their palette for Wincing the Night Away is that for the first time ever they've brought in some real variety, after how both of the first two albums (and particularly Chutes Too Narrow) were perhaps a little one-note. The variety on Wincing the Night Away doesn't mean just some changes in tempo and tone either, as Mercer takes the opportunity to take his posse into brand new waters. In most cases it means a heavier lean on keyboards as a shared lead instrument, like on soft and dreamy "Red Rabbits", but when Wincing the Night Away really lets go of its inhibitions it's a sight to behold. The surreal sway of "Sealegs", driven by its robotic drum machine and off-kilter speak-song vocals, is mind-blowingly different if you arrive here after the first two albums and almost unrecognisable as The Shins even when compared to everything else on this record, but it's a wobbly, woozy delight that subtly knits together the various threads of the album's new ideas under its more extreme guise. To a lesser extent the tightly-wound tension "Spilt Needles" is the same, first locked into a groove lead by a rhythm so sharp it jumps out immediately, before diving into a more familiar territory in its bridge, revealing a soft spot in its armor for a moment. Both "Spilt Needles" and "Sealegs" are still awash with those signature melodies, but they are practically alien in form and it's done exquisitely. 

They're also shifts to a more serious territory. The Shins have spent 90% of their song catalogue so far walking on sunshine from a musical perspective even when Mercer's lyrics were often dripping in surprisingly brutal imagery, but the tone of the songs is coming closer to the lyrics on Wincing the Night Away, even if it's still dominantly a bright indie pop album. "Sealegs" and "Spilt Needles" make the first moves, but the album's sparsest songs lay down on this even heavier, with "Black Wave" matching its title sonically to a staggering decree with its hazy, textural murkiness and "A Comet Appears" closing the album with a scared sigh. "A Comet Appears" is, overall, one of the album's real high points: after so many songs full of wim and energy, its time-worn heart and Mercer's quietly desperate delivery are an emotional stab in the heart, and it's where he utilises that gift of melody like a blade. It's both beautiful and devastating. Where "Sleeping Lessons" revved up the album ready to go in a flash of excitement, "A Comet Appears" is its polar opposite and lays the record's weary head into a long rest with a hint of sadness that it's over. I primarily associate Wincing the Night Away with positive emotions, and that's partly why "A Comet Appears" is so impactful, as it tears the facade away before disappearing into the ether.

All of that - the variety in styles, the emotional complexity, the expanded sound arsenal - is exactly what the first two Shins records needed; and compared to the later records, the production hasn't yet become overbearing. But Wincing the Night Away isn't great because it's The Shins But More! but because it feels like Mercer finally gets to realise his own potential as a songwriter here, and the decision to embellish the sound is what made it possible. The purple prose and lavish praise for the songs above aren't because they just sound great, but because as songs they are such vividly written little masterpieces that hook into your life. "New Slang" on Oh, Inverted World made an impression to everyone who heard it because its central melody felt like it spoke to you (you, directly) from the very second you first heard it and it opened a pathway to your heart you never knew existed. Someone who's written something that great is unlikely to never do so again, but it took until this point for Mercer to repeat the trick and when he finally did, the floodgates opened and he wrote several songs equally as evocative and impressive; I worked my way down the discography backwards from here and it took me a fair long while to really get to grips with the first two albums because there was a stark absence of songs so clearly realised, apart from that one song everyone loved. But there's an abundance of such inspiration and warmth to the songs here that you find yourself swallowed into their dream-like worlds, and that's what makes Wincing the Night Away not just The Shins' best - and most consistent - record, but honestly one of my favourite indie pop records in general. The Shins are a band who probably aren't all that special in the grand scheme of things for me, but who I hold special nonetheless and it's solely because of this.

Rating: 9/10

Kent - Tillbaka till samtiden (2007)

1) Elefanter; 2) Berlin; 3) Ingenting; 4) Vid din sida; 5) Columbus; 6) Sömnen; 7) Vy från ett luftslott; 8) Våga vara rädd; 9) LSD, någon?; 10) Generation ex; 11) Ensammast i Sverige

Kent embrace synths and accidentally reinvent themselves, confident and atmospheric.

Key tracks: "Elefanter", "Ingenting", "Columbus"

Kent’s discography can be divided between their pre-2007 and post-2007 output, or pre- and post-Tillbaka till samtiden. I imagine Kent themselves didn’t intend their seventh album’s influence to reach so far: the choice to utilise more synthesisers and programmed elements and to de-emphasise guitars was initially a strictly reactionary move, following the excessive (as described by the band) use of guitars on the last record as well as the amicable and coincidental departure of rhythm guitarist Harri Mänty. Unexpectedly to everyone, the album had an impact deep enough that the second half of Kent’s story would follow in its footsteps, with the sound world of Tillbaka till samtiden becoming such an integral part of Kent that the early albums became almost a distant memory. 

In retrospect, Tillbaka till samtiden is still a clear transitional phase for Kent. It’s synth pop, but as interpreted by a rock band: the style is new but the songs still follow Kent’s typical songwriting style, the insistent kick beats drill the rhythm right down to the spine like a dance track but they're still live drums even if processed within an inch of their lives, and there's still guitars and the songs that feature them most prominently (“Generation Ex”, “Berlin”, “LSD, någon?”) could have slotted in the previous albums without too many difficulties. Electronic elements and synth sounds were never unfamiliar to Kent either, and Tillbaka till samtiden is perhaps best thought as the logical end point where the band would have journeyed eventually anyway. In other words, it’s not quite the radical departure that it would seem like at a first glance and the biggest contributor to any shock factor is the simple fact that it follows Du & jag döden, the dense and epic guitar climax of their back catalogue - it's the contrast that's unusual, not the actual change.

The big difference instead between Kent as they were and Kent now is how comfortably the band find themselves settling in their new skin. No wonder they shifted their scope after this album because it becomes abundantly clear across Tillbaka till samtiden that Kent have managed to locate their comfort zone, sitting somewhere between the alternative rock ideals they made their name with and a more directly hitting and sleekly produced synth sound they were clearly inspired by, and which they had tested in the past but hadn’t nailed to their own satisfaction. That isn't to say the previous albums weren't truly Kent, but there is a kind of reactionary restlessness to them that in hindsight is identifiable as a band in search of their own place, uncertain about ever standing still. In contrast it's remarkable just how naturally the stylistic decisions made here work with the band's songwriting style and how at ease they sound in this environment; it comes across as beautifully balanced. There's still that sharpness and edge of their guitar days, even during the parts of the album where Kent are fulfilling their fantasy of what they’d do if they were in charge of a Depeche Mode or a Pet Shop Boys record. Something like "Vid din sida” is what happens when the disco drive of the earlier hit “Musik non stop” stumbles onto a cyber goth club, and the new instrumental decisions lend well to such curveballs. 

It's also an incredibly atmospheric and scene-setting album. The entire record sounds like takes place in hazy twilight or in a faintly glowing cold winter's night, and the music is dipped in thick textures conjured by the band's now-favoured synthesizer shifts: it conjures images of foggy deserted streets bathing in moonlight, late night drives staring at the city lights through the passenger window and quiet corners of dark clubs. Some tracks play off it more than others, but the feel is strong enough throughout that it's undoubtedly my favourite aspect of Tillbaka till samtiden. It's thoroughly appropriate to consider it visual album in how vividly its sound paints these associations and images (some imaginary, some based on real life moments); and by the looks of it even Kent thought it so. The booklet is nearly entirely dedicated to various atmospheric and striking photographs, and through the haunting freeze-frame poses in the music video for "Ingenting" and the arresting urban imagery in the one for "Columbus", Kent brushed off their old generic rock band videos and became a visually arresting group with their latter day music videos (though the other two singles didn't fare as well admittedly, with the live-in-studio footage of "Generation ex" and a remix of "Vy från ett luftslott" receiving a compilation of public commons media remixed into a competent Youtube fan video). It's, once again, a sign of growth as a band, taking the steps to form a wider context around the music, developing aesthetic choices to emphasise the music while creating songs that outright invite for strong visual counterparts.

It's particularly on the first half where all these aspects - the synthetic atmosphere, the electronic motion, the rock band strength -  are in balance. "Elefanter" continues Kent's streak of classic openers as it cycles through all the album's motions one after another, its sunset horizon gazing of a start shifting into distorted frustration and ultimately a bold and awe-inspiring horn-accentuated finale. It's a beautiful thing to witness and it's an opener that sticks from the very first time you hear it, and it leads onto a real gold streak. The high-speed thrill of "Berlin", the phenomenal lead single "Ingenting" that introduced the album so perfectly and still sounds like the record's purest distillation of its ideals with its foreboding tension and the insistently powerful piano hook, the pounding of "Vid din sida" and the breathtaking dark night of the soul ballad "Columbus" is a hell of power play, one after another. Many of these are instant classics, with "Elefanter", "Ingenting" and especially "Columbus" - exploding in quiet, piercingly human melancholy as its synth walls swell so hauntingly - immediately making the case that Kent have practically levelled up as they've started this new life of theirs.

There's a clear halfway break point to the album, brought by the linked couplet of "Sömnen" and "Vy från ett luftslott": the former's ambient dreamscape takes the atmospheric production to its furthest and also serves as the extended prelude to the latter's lightweight bounciness, from which point the album itself tones down the soundscapes and returns to a more familiarly dynamic Kent territory. It's a great second half too, with the charged and cruising "Våga vara rädd" riding another set of excellent horn section hooks and the impeccably stylish "Generation ex" having the kind muscular liveliness that serves the album well as it nears its end. "LSD, någon?" took the longest to grow and it's still perhaps the album's weak link, as great as it admittedly gets when it goes off the rails towards its end - it's the clearest bridge to Du & jag döden and nearly juts out because of it, but really its issue is just the fact that it takes a long, long time to get to somewhere really exciting. "Ensammast i Sverige" tides the album over towards its break of dawn after the long gloomy night, its knowingly dramatic heartbreak carried by a thudding beat around which guitars, organs and synthesizers swirl over and over as the credits roll and the narrator walks alone into the early hours of the morning. It's a confidently controlled miniature masterpiece - this album's Kent epic but not necessarily in size (even if in length, still), but rather in its emotional vastness. It’s a beautiful closer, and its relative restraint is another example of the confidence and comfort Kent have found while moving to different waters.

Unlike many transitional records, Tillbaka till samtiden is the point when the band found the last puzzle piece they were looking for rather than the awkward in-between phase, and that’s why it’s stood the test of time so brilliantly. Timewarping back to the mid-late 2000s, this was an era where a great number of rock acts discovered that a solid way to break out of a creative rut was to trade guitars to synthesizers and keyboards. Most of the time these resulted in an odd singular album or two at most, which the bands would then turn their backs on afterwards before launching into your usual return-to-roots records - and at the time it felt like Kent too were jumping onto this exact same trend. Tillbaka till samtiden was a great album back then too, but it's really gained a finer side through age and that's because unlike so many of its stylistic peers, Kent integrated those new sounds into their own heart and soul rather than simply treating them as an aesthetic choice. As a transitional record it perhaps loses some of its due attention to its siblings on both sides, but the atmospheric, evocative qualities of Tillbaka till samtiden are unmatched in Kent's discography.

Rating: 8/10

The Ark - Prayer for the Weekend (2007)

1) Prayer for the Weekend; 2) The Worrying Kind; 3) Absolutely No Decorum; 4) Little Dysfunk You; 5) New Pollution; 6) Thorazine Corazon; 7) I Pathologize; 8) Death to the Martyrs; 9) All I Want Is You; 10) Gimme Love to Give; 11) Uriel

Something for everyone, on the road to Eurovision. But they've lost their bite.

Key tracks: "Prayer for the Weekend", "Absolutely No Decorum", "Little Dysfunk You"

The Ark were never counter-culture. They liked to flirt with ideas that could make pearl-clutching worryworts squeal, but they were a band comfortably in the mainstream, getting prime airtime and scoring genuine hits. And yet, participating in the Eurovision still felt like a little too much. Granted, Sweden has always taken Eurovision more seriously than most countries and The Ark's glam glitz was a perfect fit for the show, but the band's participation in the grand European song contest in 2007 nonetheless felt like the wrong kind of popularity peak. Maybe if they had had a better song to go along with it it would have felt like a better fit - because lord knows The Ark could crank out a great bombastic pop song - but "The Worrying Kind" is a rackety romp that manages to plod despite trying its hardest to be incredibly perky, and its self-aware camp and cheese come across cheap rather than fun. It's not a very good song, and Europe largely shrugged in agreement as the continent placed The Ark as 18th out of the 24 countries competing in the 2007 finals. Wikipedia reminds me that the points largely came from the surrounding Nordic countries and 35 countries gave it nul points. Ouch.

"The Worrying Kind" isn't directly representative of the album it ended up featuring on, but the same applies for every song on the record. Prayer for the Weekend is like an attempt to be something for everyone, with The Ark changing from outfit to outfit to suit a different crowd. Just take the first half alone: in order of appearance we have a disco hullabaloo, a glam pop stomp, a classic The Ark anthem, a gothic synth pop twist, a straightforward pop/rock get-to-the-chorus hit and a tropical summer jam so sunny it comes with a cocktail umbrella. It's an album without a real sense of identity behind it, except perhaps in that it tries to please every individual in the crowd at least once. It's there where Prayer for the Weekend follows in the steps of "The Worrying Kind": it's a straightforward album where the songs get to the point quickly, and that point is a big belter of a chorus that's most of the time a thoroughly pleasant one. If it doesn't click as a coherent album because of all its disparately styled songs, then think of it more as a collection of potential singles and Eurovision attempts (given the competition's strict three-minute rule, it's easy to spot the candidates the band wrote - and "I Pathologize" should have been the one). That's when it starts making sense

 

Given all that, it’s unsurprising that Prayer of the Weekend is a hit and miss record, but it’s still staggering how frontloaded it is on its hit department: I'm cold on "The Worrying Kind" and I can give or take "New Pollution", but the rest of the list in that previous paragraph is all varying degrees of great. The horn-punched disco twang of the title track is superb and sounds like an actual party in the recording studio, "Absolutely No Decorum" doesn't invent anything new but it does what The Ark do best and it flies magnificently and effortlessly, "Little Dysfunk You" takes the synthier elements of the previous album and builds a razor sharp cut with it that drives its backbone-rattling drum beat into its gloriously dramatic chorus the likes of which Ola Salo was born to front, and "Thorazine Corazon" steers away from being an airheaded summer jam and instead simply captivates in its ridiculously upbeat nature. Even with the niggles and the incoherent style flips it’s a really great start to the album, but then the inverse is true as well and the album completely crashes towards its end. The bubblegum music theatre extravaganza of "All I Want Is You" and the painfully throwaway gospel clap-along "Gimme Love to Give" are easily the bottom two songs The Ark have ever committed on tape, to the extent that it’s genuinely surprising these are from the same band who made the first three records, and the acoustic closer "Uriel" has some idea to it but it meanders for over five minutes when it really doesn't need to. The album is a water slide that starts with ecstatic twists and turns, mellows a little towards the middle and the closer you get to the end the more you start to realise someone forgot to fill the pool below. 

 

An even bigger shame is that sometime during the recording The Ark have lost their fangs. It's probably too easy to let the album be discoloured by its Eurovision association (and I say this as someone who enjoys watching it yearly, in its own way) but nine times out of ten, going to Eurovision means that you're vying to be the nation’s darlings while making a push for international mass recognition. Prayer for the Weekend is exactly the kind of record that comfortably mingles in that particular crowd, because it’s safe enough for everyone to like. The previous three records had actual attitude, they championed particular topics with pride and meaning, the arrangements had surprises in their hats and aces in their sleeves and  the band overall exhibited a certain kind of joy de vivre that they sang out loud with gusto. In comparison, Prayer for the Weekend has ended up a lot more edgeless and vanilla (the generic super market ice cream kind, not the real deal), with songs about sweet nothings. Sometimes with albums that go from place to place you can feel the fun in the studio that the artists had when trying their hand in brand new sounds, but Prayer for the Weekend bears the sound of professional session musicians doing their day job with a careful constraint not to go too wild. The one time you get something off-track is the section in “Death to the Martyrs” where Salo gleefully shouts out “cunt”, but it’s so clunky and ill-fitting in what’s otherwise such a squeaky clean album that it feels like an editing error. Prayer for the Weekend barely sounds like a record made by The Ark, with only Salo’s vocals reminding of the personality the band radiated over the brim in the past. Without him, this could have been a record from any odd band trying to play it safe, and safe just isn’t that exciting.

It would be easy to call Prayer for the Weekend a clear sell-out record but that phrase comes with certain connotations I’m not so keen on, primarily that implies a cynical deal with the devil to get more cash. Even with its polish and facelessness, that’s never been the vibe that Prayer for the Weekend has hinted at. Maybe after the bitter and alienating State of The Ark the band felt they needed to bring back their positivity and hints of their old sound, and it somehow ended up routing them towards a path that ended in Eurovision and a record like this - I’m not certain. But the reason I feel so mixed about is because Prayer for the Weekend isn’t without its genuine strengths and I feel the need to defend it for that. It’s just that they’re mostly all in the beginning and the more you listen to the album, the more ambivalent you come to think about it.

Rating: 6/10

Physical corner: My copy is a standard jewel case + lyrics affair - some editions of the album come with a sleeve case or a holographic print to highlight the peacock feather accents, but mine’s the most basic edition you can get.

Husky Rescue - Ghost Is Not Real (2007)

1) My Home Ghost; 2) Diamonds in the Sky; 3) Nightless Night; 4) Blueberry Tree Part I; 5) Blueberry Tree Part II; 6) Blueberry Tree Part III; 7) Hurricane (Don't Come Knocking); 8) Silent Woods; 9) Shadow Run; 10) Caravan

A dream pop trip down the Finnish woods, just as enchanting as that sounds.

Key tracks: "Diamonds in the Sky", "Hurricane (Don't Come Knocking)", "Caravan"

The big step for Husky Rescue on Ghost Is Not Real, their second album, is that they have become an actual band. Where the debut Country Falls was an archetypical producer’s record, the formation of a stable live unit around it lead to Husky Rescue becoming a group with a defined membership for the second album. With a more solid workforce behind the music, it's helped the project as a whole to steer into a more cohesive place. The defining elements of the debut are still the foundation of Husky Rescue's sound - dreamy soundscapes, gently hypnotising bass, whispering vocals and atmospheric melodies. Now, in addition, there’s a more focused approach to bringing those ideas into reality. Much moreso than the debut, Ghost Is Not Real is designed as a full journey with a clear trajectory and a conceptual angle to it, and in case it's not obvious then a third of the tracklist being dominated by a three-parter should tip you off. The biggest hint is in the liner note artwork for the album and its vivid nature imagery, both real and fantastic - and that's exactly where Husky Rescue have wandered off.

There was a pervasive, if a little hard-to-define Nordic charm and magic to Country Falls, and Ghost Is Not Real consciously dives into that a whole lot more this time around. Throughout the album the band very explicitly tap into various yet unmistakably Nordic nature imagery, e.g. “Nightless Night”, the “Blueberry Tree” trilogy and most poignantly on the wonderful serene winter stillness of "Silent Woods". Even in the songs where it isn't the central theme of the song, nature is still a tangible influence that pops up throughout one-off lyrics or even the sounds used within the songs. You don’t really listen to Husky Rescue for their lyrics but here they serve the important point of adding the final brushstrokes to the images painted with the music, hammering in the very atmosphere they’re trying to nail down. Country Falls created bite-size cinematic scores with each song and that approach is still there, but extended to a full-length feature. Ghost Is Not Real is a pseudo-documentary about road tripping through the Finnish countryside, each song a snapshot of a particular place and time that’s somewhere between real, vivid memories of seasons experienced and a kind of magical reality where every element is heightened.

Ghost Is Not Real invokes the beauty of the Finnish nature through the music especially well, in a way that even I think is preposterously pretentious to say if it wasn't for how I genuinely feel about it. To dig a little deeper there, my roots lie in Finland and the very thing I miss the most from my old haunts is the nature. Finland is a large country with a small population, with stretches and stretches of forests, fields and lakes in-between and even within the central population areas. Because the country is up north, it gets the full range of seasons in their most iconic guises: the cold, snow-covered winters, the verdant and warm summer, the visible transformation of spring and the multi-colour melancholy of autumn. Nightless nights in midsummer, the darkness that never ends in the depth of winter. You grow up in Finland and the nature becomes an integral part of who you are as a person, with deeply ingrained sensory memories which still feel fresh decades later. Those feelings and memories are pretty much impossible to really describe with words to people who do not have them (though, full caveat, will have their own equivalents), and much less in a way that doesn’t involve any kind of visuals. But that's precisely what Husky Rescue have achieved here. I listen to Ghost Is Not Real and I see those places in my mind; what the band have created here stirs those memories.

Strictly from a musical perspective, at the heart of Ghost Is Not Real as well as Husky Rescue in general lies an artful balance between between instantly affecting pop songs with big, bold melodies, and daydreamy mood pads that drift the listener somewhere else. The debut had a slight imbalance between the two, but here the band have achieved as close to an equilibrium as they can. “Diamonds in the Sky” is the very testament to that: it's the dictionary definition of Husky Rescue's sound and it's as perfect as you’d want that kind of ideal representation to be, both in terms of its sugar-sweet melodies and the lush ambience in-between them, transporting you to the backseat of a car driving through the quiet night-time countryside. “Caravan” might be an even better example. Each Husky Rescue album has that one stand-out hit cut where the band go all-in on those melodic hooks and "Caravan" is arguably the very best of them, with a driving chorus so sweet and gorgeous you’ll brush away the inherent bittersweetness of the song itself. It's a magnificent song that's both a jolt of energy as well as guaranteed headphone heaven, and if you haven't been convinced by Reeta-Leena's vocals being absolutely pitch perfect for the band's sound by the end the of the album, it's her heavenly presence here that should act as the ultimate proof. As a frontperson she's not the type who instantly commands the floor the second she steps in front of the mic, but after the practice run of the debut her soft delivery has bloomed into an essential part of the warmth of Husky Rescue's music. 

The big thing that Ghost Is Not Real introduces is the added dynamics to the group's sound. They're a real band now - a band who have gotten to trust eachother on stage and who play excellently together, and which they've decided to take to the studio with them. There's so many moments on Ghost Is Not Real that have a thrilling energy to them or which downright burst to life because of how the group, well, sound like a group on the record. The seven-minute, guitar-revved "Nightless Night" is a mad rush through the woods for its entire length and legitimately rocks, which is a brand new concept for Husky Rescue but introduced excellently because they sound like a group playing tightly together and not just session musicians. Later down the line "Hurricane (Don't Come Knocking)" takes that same urgency and retools it for use in what otherwise could have been another (admittedly lovely) dream pop song, but now it explodes and cascades in whimsical abandon while still retaining its studio-perfect arrangements; the production and arrangements in general are fantastic throughout, perfect for a headphone jaunt, and it's surprisingly the wilder moments like "Hurricane" that really bring it out. The "Blueberry Tree" trilogy is understandably the album's heart: the dreamy build-up of part 1 starts the experience gently, before moving onto the magical part 2 that skitters gleefully in its twinkling melodies, and finally the last part builds on the melodies of the first two and grows them into a majestic post-rock-esque rock climax. Together they form a gorgeous ten-minute journey that tips its toes into the various facets of Husky Rescue, brings out the beauty of the nature themes the album is centered around and ends in a thrilling way that paves the way perfectly for the last half of the album. The band sound alive and in sync, not just studio wizardry anymore but utilising the pitch-perfect production to heighten their own chemistry.

Ghost Is Not Real is Husky Rescue's best record purely from a musical perspective and through its songs, and that's something I'd imagine is a fairly universal, non-controversial take. What makes it special for me though is the particular atmosphere it invokes. I'm not certain how much they exactly planned to channel the spirit of their country through when they went all-in on the nature imagery around the album (I can't find any interviews, sadly), but I do know that after moving out of Finland this was one of the albums that kept me company when homesick, precisely because of how much like home it sounded. Between the blissful melodies and delicate soundtrack textures there's a warm, tangible feeling I associate clearly with my own roots - delivered through the perfectly fitting form of a stunningly good dream pop album.

Rating: 9/10

Manic Street Preachers - Send Away the Tigers (2007)

1) Send Away the Tigers; 2) Underdogs; 3) Your Love Alone Is Not Enough; 4) Indian Summer; 5) The Second Great Depression; 6) Rendition; 7) Autumnsong; 8) I'm Just a Patsy; 9) Imperial Bodybags; 10) Winterlovers; 11) Working Class Hero [hidden track]
 

They trashed the party and brushed off the crowds, now it's the morning after hangover and they're texting everyone to apologise. Here's some ready-made radio singles for you, just as cynical and empty as that sounds.

Key tracks: "Indian Summer", "Imperial Bodybags", "Winterlovers"

After Lifeblood, the Manics went drifting. The band had created an incredible record but they had let it intentionally fly under the radar with the bare minimum of promotion, following a few years of attempted detachment from their late 90s mainstream success. Afterwards the band took a break, with both James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire releasing solo albums to similarly little recognition apart from the established fanbase. The arena-headlining days had started to fade into memory. Even though they had intentionally pushed themselves away from being airwave darlings, by the time the band reconvened to record their next album they were already starting yearn back to it - on second thought, it was fun being popular rock stars.

The Manics’ approach to rectify this is a somewhat misaimed exercise of trying to capture old glories, but misunderstanding why they appealed the first time around. There isn’t anything inherently wrong in going back to an older sound and when in Manics’ case this is back to big guitar walls, in concept that’s fine - even I would say that the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about Manics are the big guitar-lead rock moments. But Send Away the Tigers is characterised by how it captures the form but not the spirit of the past. The songs have been written solely to fit into a perceived category of what makes a traditional Manics anthem, and even before we get to the meat-and-potatoes production they’ve been overengineered within the inch of their lives to fill their roles. This is the big single, this is the stadium fist-pump moment, this is the big slow burner, this is the political punk rocker. It’s Manics doing karaoke of themselves, going through ideas they think will be appreciated by the general crowds while avoiding the ones that were present in the albums that didn’t produce hits.

“Underdogs” is somewhat of a perfect example of the misgivings of Send Away the Tigers and the album’s broken spirit. The song was released as a sneaky preview single before the actual start of the campaign, as a thank you song for the fans, as a song about the fans. Instead, it felt more insulting for them because how completely off it is tonally. Musically it tries to go for a rowdy punk vibe, but it's rather like a group of grown men awkwardly trying to be young reckless teens again - the musical equivalent of the ill-fitting teen goth eyeliner during your old man’s midlife crisis phase. It’s meant to be a celebration of the fans but its ‘you are misfits and freaks and we love you for it’ emphasises the wrong parts of that sentence, and no fan appreciation song should ever contain the lines “people like you need to fuck people like me”. "Underdogs" tries to be anarchistic and controversial like the band’s old glam punk phase, but it's not natural and no one’s heart seems to be in it. The fact that the song contains one of the most obvious copy/paste editing errors I’ve heard (the first chorus ends with an abrupt mid-syllable “TH-“, as a direct cut from the final chorus that's about to launch to the finale) just underlines how no one seemed to really care about the final song, just as long as it looked the right part. It's actually a little incredible how much it backfired - the reaction to the song was so crushing that when the album was re-released for its tenth anniversary, the song was retroactively scrubbed away from existence.

But it sets the scene for Send Away the Tigers, an album full of similar by-the-numbers tickbox exercises and clunky ideas. The Manics try to make big rock moments like they used to back in the mid-90s, with a splash of the politics that Wire wants to be sure you know the band are famous for, but the actual songwriting has been brushed off to the side from way of making sure the songs fit those particular aesthetics. They're quick verse-chorus-verse repetitions whi are kept within tidy and radio-friendly three and half minutes but rarely do they offer an interesting melody or an idea you'd remember afterwards, the obligatory guitar solos are present just because they’re expected and not because they have anything to show, and Wire’s supposed to return to his old fiery lyrics results in clunky, wishy-washy nothings. The songs aren’t so much bad as they are just a lot of nothing - rote runthroughs of obvious hooks and riffs that lack feeling or drive, devoid of anything unexpected or new in their arrangements. You do get familiar notes of past greats but without the melodies that made them so memorable. "The Second Great Depression" should be an epic wall of sound in line with "Ready for Drowning" or "No Surface All Feeling" but it's running through the motions with second-rate Britrock mannerisms even as it reaches its peaks, like a washed out veteran band playing the mandatory new song among the hits that people came to listen.

There are only few actual misfires - “Underdogs”, the baffling cheesefest “Autumnsong” (with its equally baffling “baby what have you done to your hair” lyric which you’ll hear several times, because all the verses are the same in peak Wire laziness), the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it throwaway “Rendition” that’s one of the weakest songs found on a Manics album - but even they’re not actively offensive. I’m happy to even defend the finale of “Underdogs” from a purely musical perspective as the song finally gets some kind of a backbone. But they’re clunky misrepresentations of the strengths of the band playing them. The enjoyable parts feel almost like accidents and often come with caveats, like how the simple organ intro leading to the opening guitars of "Send Away the Tigers" stands out because in an album full of uninteresting arrangements, it's at least something less monotonous. Notably “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough”, which netted the Manics the brief hit they desperately wanted, has a chorus that blissfully soars and nets that nice dopamine hit it seeks to score, but unfortunately it’s marred by the frustrating and borderline annoying stop-start nature of the verses. Even the usually endlessly charismatic Nina Persson sounds bored and barely engaged with the song. "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough" stands out because it sounds like the most time was put into it in order to turn it into an event of a lead single that would pop out when playing in the radio, but it gives the impression that it was so overworked on that no one had any enthusiasm left when the recording finally started.

But there are also real silver linings. “I’m Just a Patsy” and "Imperial Bodybags" are the few times where the band sound happy to be back in familiar musical territory again, with a bit more bite in their arena-pleading choruses and some life in their arrangements. They both have their yeah-buts (mainly in the lyrics department) but they bring out the genuine rejuvenated energy you expected the 'Manics return to rock' album to be full of: the bombastic "I'm Just a Patsy" backs its crowd singalong antics with an actually strong set of hooks (and an intriguingly effective fade-in-fade-out set of synth strings), and the chugga-chugga riffs and shuffling drums "Imperial Bodybags" sound like the band's actually having fun. The verses of “Indian Summer” are basically a shameless retread of “A Design for Life” but the song carries some actual gravitas and the its elegant bridge leading to the unexpectedly low-key chorus gives a glimpse of what this project could have been. “Winterlovers” is by far the only actual, real keeper of the record: it’s the one song where the band sound like they genuinely care, that it has some actual passion behind its wistfulness. The instrumental breakdown where all the band’s core instruments - the bass, the guitar and the drums - all get a little special spotlight moment in a row is the single most memorable instrumental section of the album and signals that some actual thought went into this song, instead of the boring arrangements of nearly everything else.

It's still faint praise though. There are parts of Send Away the Tigers I enjoy but the album is a tiny de-clawed kitten pretending it's growling fearsomely like a full-grown tiger, and all the loud guitars in the world can't hide the averageness of the songs - what good is there isn't enough to make an album you'd want to revisit when there are so many more, better albums with actual heart in them. It's the latter part that really brings the album down for me. Returning to guitars made sense for the Manics at this point, following the de-emphasis of the instrument around the Forever Delayed/Lifeblood years and the solo trips inevitably making the band want to reconvene in as Manics-like fashion as possible. But Send Away the Tigers doesn't sound like a group of friends refreshed and rocking out, it sounds like it was designed in a boardroom, created in order to get a foothold in the spotlight. I'm not going to call it a sell-out album because it's not like there was an arena-rock sized hole in the post-landfill indie recovery years ca. 2007; although even I winced at the desperation of making an appearance in every British TV show known to man as it culminated in an embarrassing appearance of playing the instrumental to "Imperial Bodybags" during a daytime TV talk show wacky live competition section. But if Wire's token descriptor quote for this period was "Guns n Roses playing The White Album", it's closer to post-MTV bloat Axl Rose covering solo McCartney: overengineered and safe of expectations, by people who made better things when throwing themselves fully into ideas they believed in even if no one else did.

I'm going to finish this with a personal anecdote, as I so often do with Manics album reviews because of the way this band has managed to weave into my life. My main memory of Send Away the Tigers is my very first listen of it, released during my first trip to the UK, listening to it there and then in the place I stayed over. It should have been a big moment - I was a humongous fan and a then-anglophile and so a new Manics album during my first UK trip was practically a daydream - but I mainly just recall feeling absolutely nothing after the album finished playing. None of the emotional highs of the previous first listens, none of the familiar special buzz I felt whenever I'd hear Bradfield's voice or the distinct Manics tone their music had. Just nothing. Send Away the Tigers shook me off the fanboy phase and I never really recovered from it. I've since made my peace with the album but it still carries that same nothingness; the drop between it and the previous records becomes even more tangible when you listen to it alongside the other albums, especially if you go about it chronologically. It's an empty shell of a record, from a band who could do so much better.

Rating: 5/10

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (2007)

1) Black Mirror; 2) Keep the Car Running; 3) Neon Bible; 4) Intervention; 5) Black Wave/Bad Vibrations; 6) Ocean of Noise; 7) The Well and the Lighthouse; 8) (Antichrist Television Blues); 9) Windowsill; 10) No Cars Go; 11) My Body Is a Cage

Arcade Fire hear people talk about their epic sound and decide that yes, we can top that.

Key tracks: "Intervention", "No Cars Go", "My Body Is a Cage"

Funeral was a record of skyscraping anthems which stole people's hearts at large, but it came from a grounded setting: it was music by a group of ordinary people escaping shared sorrow through communal celebration, manifested into something larger than all of them combined. I don’t think Arcade Fire necessarily meant to make it so colossal, it just shaped up that way through the combined power of a collective of multi-instrumentalists putting all of their hearts behind the music. But the size of their sound became Arcade Fire’s shtick: their songs became synonymous with the rapturous joy of hundreds or thousands of individuals singing along to every wordless melody, strings and bells and whistles in tow. 

On the other hand Neon Bible, the direct follow-up to Funeral, is a giant by design. The crowd-raiser moments are grander, the choruses bellow out bigger and the drama fuelling them is more intense, and it’s the clearest in the production. Neon Bible's crescendoing walls of sound are made up of layers upon layers of elements that expand far beyond the capacities of the band themselves: there’s choirs, there’s orchestras, there’s the booming church organ that’s become the album’s signature sound even though it only appears in two songs. A lot of the hyper-awareness to a wider concept and unifying design which has become second nature for the band (for the chagrin of some) started to pop up at this stage as well, with unified dress codes, cryptic teaser trailers and running threads through the otherwise unrelated lyrics. This was Arcade Fire intentionally going big, extending their reach far beyond Funeral's scope as if to prove they deserved to be one of the biggest acts of the Pitchforkverse. The message of Neon Bible went the same route and also took a leap further from the personal drama of its predecessor, as it cast its sights into the wider world. It’s not subtle about its message - “not much chance of survival if the Neon Bible is right” - and its delivered with the fire of an apocalyptic preacher shouting at the masses about the end of the world. Funeral was a happy accident of circumstances - Neon Bible was made from the ground up to be a bombastic show of force, a band trying to direct their own hype by amplifying what they understood made them special the first time around.

As a direct result there's a kind of po-faced self-awareness and intentional seriousness around Neon Bible. “Black Mirror” kicks off the album like a cult leader summoning forth the titular device to reflect on the doom and gloom of the world, and from thereon in the album conjures another apocalyptic theme after another. Greed, war, delusion, personal disillusionment, religious hypocrisy; even the moments of escapism sound uncertain, like when the “let’s go” rallying calls of “No Cars Go” are undercut with a quiet “don’t know where we’re going...” just as the music switches gears. It’s clear Win Butler wants to be a spokesperson for Important Things and though he’s not always successful (for every insight he makes, he throws out a clunker like “MTV, what have you done to me?”), he’s absolutely earnest about his intentions. His power as a frontman - and to the same extent Regine Chassagné's power as his vocal counterpart - is the undoubting passion and sincerity he brings into his ideas and performance, and the conviction and zeal which made the personal anecdotes of Funeral so strong are just as powerful here. If Butler is preachy, then he’s the kind of preacher who can charm a crowd to eat up every single warning of fire and brimstone he can shout out. And this time he’s come armed with the sound most overwhelming: out of all Arcade Fire albums, Neon Bible leans heaviest into the innate epic theatrics of the band.  

I have an unabashed, probably uncool love for music that sounds massive. It doesn't suit everything and it's not a surefire way to win my praise, but my heart does often flutter with honest awe when steady build-ups explode into epic finales: I'm the guy who will predictably love all those epic closer songs hovering around ends of tracklists, smiling as the fireworks and production credits explode during the credits roll. Neon Bible is, basically, one such moment after another, with everything but the title track (which is a quiet, two-minute rumination that's more characteristic of an interlude) going gigantic at least once during its course, sometimes several times in different ways. It has its musical vision set to the absolute maximum, the epic finales of Funeral turned into full songs. And it never fails, because Arcade Fire are geniuses in this game. Neon Bible may put on the guise of serious doom mongering, but in practice it's a thrill ride: joy and anxiety holding hands and riding a tidal wave of production elements and elaborate arrangements, moving from one instrumental high to another, everyone hollering and encouraging the listener to join. The lyrical concepts accompanying the music may falter from time to time from scaling up, but in the song department the band score perfect strikes in a fearsomely consistent fashion. 

The reason I love big bombastic finales so much is because when executed properly, they are incredibly cathartic - they explicitly pull out those big emotions out of you and give them the ability to spread their wings with the music, making you feel that nothing matters in this world but the very moment you're connecting with right now. But you need the right kind of song to go with it, and there isn't a single track on Neon Bible that doesn't hit that mark, so much so that reading through the tracklist becomes a catalogue of moments in time when I've been overwhelmed by the Great Big Feeling that they coaxed out: the communal hand-clap hullaballoo of "Keep the Car Running", the liberating freak-out breakdown splicing through the hyper-rockabilly of "(Antichrist Television Blues)", the swelling feels that sweep in as the band on "Windowsill" are drowned by the choir and wipe away the memories of the lyric about MTV, the "Un! Deux! Trois! Dis miroir noir!" in "Black Mirror", the technicolour light of the blissed-out chorus to "The Well and the Lighthouse", the tone flip when the bright "Black Wave" morphs into "Black Vibrations" and the song feels the pressure of the shadow of the great all-drowning sea looming over it. They are wonderful songs through and through full of hooks and melodies that live on, that funnel their powers towards a singular point until they burst in ecstatic magic.

The greatest showcase for the power of the album’s arrangements lies towards the end. “No Cars Go” was first released on the band’s debut EP, but it's an awkward fit there: a good idea begging for an execution that doesn't leave it limping across the floor. Here, it's been brought back and resurrected into the colossus it aspired to be. Every single second of it goes off - each swoon of its strings, each voice in the choir, each underpinning note of the horn section, the completely superlative breakdown following its second chorus that is one of purest expressions of joy in music I've heard. It’s potentially the most bombastic Arcade Fire have ever been but it deserves to be larger than life, and it sounds so, so gorgeous in this final form: it's the ideal behind every life-affirming moment that was heard on Funeral, gilded and tangible. It's the natural peak for Neon Bible's multi-faceted journey, and following it up with something else in the tracklist seems like a surefire way to be let down by context, but "My Body Is a Cage" defies any expectations you'd set for it subconsciously. What you'd expect for a fitting follow-up to "No Cars Go" to close the record would be to attempt to scale its epic heights even further, or do something completely contrasting, and so "My Body Is a Cage" does both. It's the album's darkest moment, the neon shades of the bible faintly flickering on and off one by one, with Win Butler singing from what sounds like the middle of oblivion - far from the blissful optimism that came before. But more significantly, there are two songs on the album that feature the majestic, all-encompassing grand church organ, which by its very nature is literally the biggest musical showpiece on the record, and "My Body Is a Cage" is one of the two. That moment halfway through as the organ kicks into full gear following a brief silence and when the band try to match its loudness and intensity is the sound of the apocalypse coming that the Neon Bible warned about all the way back at the start of the record. It makes the hairs on your back stand up for attention: Win Butler yearns for redemption and liberation and he sings it with such conviction that you, too, start to believe in its rapture. It's a phenomenal showpiece, and a stunning way to close the album.

The other organ-featuring song is "Intervention", which is an Arcade Fire powerhouse moment on steroids. Build-ups, back and forth vocals, impassioned performance, fist-pumping chorus - but now with a giant organ right off the bat and an orchestra to accompany it (the moment when the strings appear is one of the band's greatest singular moments). It's unashamedly huge, and it's basically manna from heaven for my musical tastebuds; and it's a perfect example that no matter how many things you place on top of one another on Neon Bible, they each still get the breathing space needed to make an impact. It's a impressive song with an impressive sound, yet still so full of little details and atmosphere which turn it from great to iconic. The arrangements serve the songs and the other way around: both built around one another in perfect symbiosis, the production emphasising the tonal undercurrents of the songs that were from the get-go written for these grand ideas. And while everything on Neon Bible is huge in comparison to many other albums, it's still at its very best when it really goes all-in on that impactful wall of sound, as evidenced by "Intervention", "No Cars Go", "My Body Is a Cage", or "Ocean of Noise". That song may be the album's most graceful moment - a yearning slow dance by the moonlit pier - but it becomes something wholly different when Butler backs away and lets the strings and horns take over as the lead, every colour in the spectrum flooding in synesthesic beauty and tugging more heartstrings than any singular voice ever could. Neon Bible sometimes literally covers its singers with its arrangements, but it becomes the logical extension for the feelings those voices started to express, amplifying them rather than drowning them out.

Because Neon Bible and Arcade Fire get it. They get why these grand bombastic moments can hit so powerfully to the listener, why sometimes you should strive for something universal, and they understand how you can make something so big without it sounding crowded or overproduced. Sounding epic isn't simply about making things louder: it's about taking the core emotion of the song, and then reshaping it with other tools until it becomes the core of very moment you live in. Neon Bible is in my books a perfect representation of that. It resonates because it makes a point about stirring its - and your - emotions into its central tenet: be it the grim foreboding, the tearjerking bittersweetness or the unbridled glee that the band so effortlessly weave in and out and in-between from. Despite how it's a less intimate album than its predecessor, which it often gets compared to as its immediate follow-up, Neon Bible has always felt more personal to me than Funeral. I joined the Funeral hype squad a little after everyone else already had, but Neon Bible felt like my discovery, my experience to intake. The impatient wait for it - with the radio rips, the enticing samples in the teaser trailer (still one of my favourite album trailers) and the internet breadcrumb trail of news that was still something novel - and the eventual first time of hearing its massive sound through my speakers made the album that much more impactful on a personal level, with all those hopes and dreams for what the album could be turning into a reality. It struck a particular connection with me, and over the years it has become more than just its music for me - it's an experience that feels close to my own heart specifically, where I feel like my entire body pays attention to when I listen to it. It's a special record and it's not because of its message or concept or themes - Butler has never made for much of a social commentator and while it has some stand-out moments ("My Body Is a Cage" in particular) lyrically, I'm not intimately attached to the words on the album like I am with many others of my perfect score records. But if a picture says more than a thousand words, then in Neon Bible's case those orchestras, organs, horns and several passionate Canadians shouting harmonies into the microphone express more than any lyric ever could.

Rating: 10/10

Physical corner: Jewel case stored in a cardboard sleeve, and a wonderfully thick lyric/art booklet with alternative artwork underneath the main artwork on the sleeve.

Rubik - Jesus Vs. People (2007)

CD1 (Jesus): 1) Jesus; 2) Motorik Haiku; 3) Telec; 4) Swim Swim Swim; 5) Hell=; 6) Yes I Know But Thank You Anyway
CD2 (People Go Missing): 1) Telecvokning; 2) Haiku Motorik; 3) Don't Take a Swim; 4) Feel Like a Spark; 5) (untitled); 6) Just Heads Dropping

A set of two EPs: one the band's debut EP, the second a reimagination of it. Musically and conceptually intriguing.

Key tracks: "Haiku Motorik" / "Motorik Haiku"

Jesus vs People pulls together two EPs from both sides of Rubik’s debut Bad Conscience Patrol. On one side you have the debut EP People Go Missing, while the other is a set of new songs dubbed the Jesus EP, named after and tied behind the radio mix of the Bad Conscience Patrol cut “Jesus/Hypnotist”. The really interesting thing comes with the tracklists - half of Jesus features half of People Go Missing, re-envisioned and re-recorded by a now more experienced and adventurous band. What could just have been a re-release or a set of stop gap songs in-between albums is now instead a fascinating snapshot of a band in development, hinting at the future by reworking their own past. 

People Go Missing managed to create a bit of a buzz around the band when it was first released, including myself, and if there’s one specific reason for that it’s “Haiku Motorik”. Early Rubik were moody and intense, coming across as a mixture of Radiohead’s atmospherics and Mew’s dynamics, and “Haiku Motorik” was where the two met perfectly. Initially propelled by a steady beat and a twinkling piano melody, it eventually explodes into a swarm of guitars, keyboards and sheer muscular power as if by a flick of a switch - and for myself and I presume for many others, that flick is the moment when Rubik went from a better-than-average MySpace act to a genuine point of interest. It’s still by and far the best thing on the EP and a highlight even in the overall discography, its primal power never getting old. It’s bookended by good company: the creeping, stop-start/quiet/loud starter “Telecvokning” gets into a good swing with its guitar-heavy choruses (it’s easy to forget how guitar-driven this band was in the early days) even if the constant pauses start eating the song away a little towards the end, while “Don’t Take a Swim” completes the great starter trilogy with its laidback lounge groove that builds up nicely during its runtime, complete with some deliciously earworm-y melodies and details. The second half of the EP doesn’t quite measure up to its first: there’s a clear focus on slow-building creep and further quiet/loud dynamics, but while the calmer “Feel Like a Spark” and the rawer “Just Heads Dropping” (as well as the untitled instrumental interlude) are fine, they’re clearly cut from a less memorable cloth than the first three songs. 

Which is why it makes sense that it’s the first half that’s been chosen to go through the facelift process on the newer half of the collection. The Jesus EP foreshadows the band’s move away from the more traditional rock sound of their debut into a more developed sound of their own, toning away some of the guitars and beginning to introduce new sonic elements – in this EP’s case it mainly manifests in some electronic flavourings. “Motorik Haiku” is the clearest example as the original’s name is flipped and its sound turned into a full-on electronica/synth-pop form, with the previous structure and arrangement twisted and played around with. It’s enjoyable and groovy in its own way, but the dynamics have been smoothened out as well and the result isn’t as explosive as the original. “Telecvokning” (now just “Telec”) on the other hand gets a rekindled fire under its belly with some processed sound that underline the atmosphere, a more powerful production that really gives it an oomph and a more consistently rocking finale in place of the original’s dynamic flips. “Swim Swim Swim” keeps mostly to the original, but it speeds up the tempo into a rapid shuffle. It could go either way – I prefer the surreal chill vibe of the original but the band sound more hyped up in the remake, and they both have their strengths to an equal degree. 

The last two songs on Jesus are new to the EP, but still follow the footsteps of People Go Missing by ending the suite on two slow, atmospheric dirges. Much like with the first EP as well, these are lesser works compared to the rest; though, that said, “Hell=” turns out be an understatedly pretty song that almost becomes a highlight of its own, thanks to its admittedly nifty guitar work. The apocalyptic “Yes I Know But Thank You Anyway” builds wall of sound around itself as it grows into its booming ending, but for all the dramatic bluster it still struggles to stand out. In addition to the two final songs, there’s also the lead-in track “Jesus”, originally one of Bad Conscience Patrol’s highlights with its unexpextedly softer and lusher tone. Now the extended collapse and rebuild of its middle section has been chopped off and it carries a more radio-shiny mixing courtesy of outside mixer Michael Ilbert, but it’s hardly a radical reworking and all the song’s strengths are still intact. It’s a little superfluous and out of place here, carrying little similarity to any of the other five songs, but it’s still a lovely song - and out of everything on the EP, it’s “Jesus” that would signal the band’s upcoming progression the clearest.

Neither of the two EPs are all-out great as they both fizzle out towards the end, but the inclusion of the Jesus side in the first place turns both into something more interesting than the pure sum of their parts. They’re not only just an interesting duo to compare and contrast with each other (clearly intended by the band), but it quickly yet effectively doubles up the amount of great moments. Even if they’re interpretations of the same material, they’re fully distinct enough for neither to fully overthrow the other. This is obviously a curio grab for the bigger fans and the main attraction is the re-issue of People Go Missing, but the band were kind enough to make it more than just a plain re-release. 

Rating: 7/10

Sea Wolf - Leaves in the River (2007)

1) Leaves in the River; 2) Winter Windows; 3) Black Dirt; 4) The Rose Captain; 5) Middle Distance Runner; 6) You’re a Wolf; 7) Song for the Dead; 8) Black Leaf Falls; 9) The Cold, the Dark & the Silence; 10) Neutral Ground

More cosy and comfortable singer/songwriter indie rocking, effectively an extension of the preceding EP. But maybe more isn't better in this case.

Key tracks: "Winter Windows", "You're a Wolf", "The Cold, the Dark & the Silence"

I have a soft spot for indie singer/songwriters and over the course of time I’ve heard a lot of them: my period of exponential musical growth happened to coincide with when it started getting easy for any musician to publish their music over the internet, and I’ve ended up gravitating towards a lot of guitars (often acoustic) plucking moody melodies. Some have become collection mainstays, countless others have faded back away as quickly as they appeared in the first place. Despite how I still have the actual physical CD, Alex Brown Church’s Sea Wolf outfit is much more closely aligned with the latter than it is with the former. Leaves in the River sounds instantly familiar, but it’s because it’s been recorded under countless different names by hundreds of artists and Church hasn’t really found his own voice - as a songwriter, lyricist or literally. 

He can write a good melody though. He’s generally a decent songwriter who goes through his soft indie folk in an enjoyable manner that makes for good background music, but now and then he busts out a song that shows he’s capable of much more as well. On Leaves in the River they’re “Winter Windows” and “The Cold, the Dark & the Silence” in particular, as they do what very little else on the album does and command attention as they grip with their hooks and entice with their decidedly different sounds compared to the rest of the album: the former stars organs and keyboards and sports a whimsical rhythm worlds away from the rest of the album, while the latter is carried by a steady processed beat and a jangly guitar. They both also push out a different, more evocative kind of charisma from the normally a bit too calm and collected Church. “You’re a Wolf”, the cello-accentuated, quickly-paced highlight of the pre-album EP Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low finds its second home here in a completely unchanged form and becomes the album’s heart and centre point. All three jump and stand out from the general peaceful lull of the rest of the album: one where pretty but nondescript melodies are gently picked under a smooth vocal. It makes for nice rainy day listening but falls short of grasping any personal hold.

This wasn’t really an issue on the aforementioned Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low EP because its brief length and the resulting focus didn’t allow it to crop up. The album is more of the same that the EP offered in sound and style, just with a little more polish in production which you can notice, but can’t say if it’s for better or worse. On paper that sounds like a winning formula, but in full length format the relative ‘ordinariness’ Sea Wolf slips into is accentuated. You can’t really criticise the album – or Church for that matter – for it, but it makes it hard to squeeze any great detail out of it either.

Leaves in the River has an earnestness and warmth to it that arguably makes it the best one out of the Sea Wolf full-lengths, so it has that going on for it. Considering it’s a pleasant listen, damning it with faint praise feels mean – unfortunately, it’s just not gripping enough to have ever elevated into anything more over the years.

Rating: 6/10