1) Goodbye; 2) Saw It on TV; 3) For Nothing; 4) Shine; 5) Everything that Surrounds Us; 6) Windmills; 7) Hypno Eyes; 8) Forest for the Trees; 9) Everything Under Control; 10) Everything’s Fine
The move from the debut's freshness towards slicker and more radio-friendly waters begins.
Not to be too melodramatic about it but it’s Kemopetrol’s second album and it’s the end of them as they were. The start of something different as well, though.
Slowed Down,
the band’s debut, sounded a little out of sync with everything else
that was going on in Finland at the time. The general mainstream state
was that of flux: the millennial shift times were characterised by the
Finnish indie rock scene starting to find its feet underground, while
the radio play belonged to groups trying their hands at adapting
American and British mainstream approaches for a Finnish taste.
Kemopetrol’s chilled out, daydreaming bedroom indie pop was something
completely different. But the Finnish mainstream has a habit of adopting
outsiders with a very open mind: primary examples include the
mainstreamification of metal to the point of making Christmas and
children’s versions of it, and how the country managed to turn the
combination of reggae and Finnish folk music into a legitimate
commercial trend. So Slowed Down became a hit and slowly started shaping the scene sound in its own way. And that’s where we come to Everything’s Fine, the second album.
It’s
either a case of the mainstream adapting to Kemopetrol pretty heavily
or Kemopetrol deciding to go on a more commercial route, but there’s a
definite transitional transformation going on with the band’s second
album. It’s slick, punchy and polished – the homely musicians have
suddenly turned into radio superstars. This happened without warning:
normally a development like this would take a couple of albums and a few
careful toe-dips in the water before fully diving in, but as soon as
the sharp, slick futuro-disco of “Goodbye” reveals itself it’s clear the
band have gone through a reinvention. They’re shiny, painfully cool and
painfully hip with the times. They’ve lost some of their original charm
and have started on the road they’d walk for the next few albums (ie
most of their active duration) as relative mainstream darlings.
Not inherently bad when you’ve got the songs to back it up, which Kemopetrol do. In addition, Everything’s Fine
is a little bit of a transitional effort even if at first it seems like
it’s loaded with just the suave hits. All the singles are loaded right
up the front: the pounding “Goodbye”, the glitzy “Saw It on TV” that
might as well be Finnish pop/rock of the early 00s in a nutshell, the
name-appropriate “Shine” and the lightly rocking “For Nothing” (which
wasn’t a single per se but still got some air play). They’re all fine
tunes for most parts: “Goodbye” in particular is pretty excellent
despite its anaemic and thoroughly pointless guitar solo. But once the
initial hit wave has gone Everything’s Fine reveals its best
parts by showing some different sides. “Everything that Surrounds Us”,
“Everything’s Fine” and “Forest for the Trees” are all minimal piano
driven pieces but each one approaches the formula differently:
“Everything that Surrounds Us” swivels around intimately, the title
track is a late night mood piece and “Forest for the Trees” adds a
little beat to the backbone and is a surprisingly affective song despite
being a glaringly simple and straightforward mid-tempo rocker. “Hypno
Eyes” brings a sudden bit of tight groove into the mix, being led by a
hypnotically thumping rhythm in some dark disco somewhere.
The most
inspired are the last remaining tracks. “Everything Under Control” is
bombastic and dramatic, almost aggressive - and in a fashion that suits
the band better than the debut’s sudden forays into hard rock riffs.
Instead, the song is driven by a simple piano melody, a swivelling
accordion and a hoover (!) and it grows into colossal heights you
would’ve never suspected from such a band who normally tends to stay
grounded. “Windmills” is even better. The accordion is back, this time
floating weightlessly around the airy production, and it meets with a
dreamy chorus and Charlie’s Angels melodies, mixing into a daydream of a
pop song. It also feels like the closest tie to the atmosphere set by Slowed Down (make of that what you will).
The sequencing is so that Everything’s Fine
is a little bit of an album of two (almost) halves. The first half
re-introduces Kemopetrol as a genuine mainstream force, then the second
half applies the same production tricks to a group of songs more
reminiscent of the first album. First re-invention, then natural
evolution. If you want to be cruel about it, this is somewhat the end of
Kemopetrol at their most original as the subsequent albums would see
the band walking well-worn paths after others. At this stage though they
still had enough of their own to lead rather than follow. Everything’s Fine is definitely not as timeless as Slowed Down
but it still plays out strong, in particular during the second half
that has aged very gracefully. It’s a little sad it doesn’t quite follow
in the debut’s steps, especially since whenever it does it’s at its
best, but time has definitely showed this to be a better follow-up than
initially thought. Kemopetrol wouldn’t be the same band they were on the
debut ever again, but here they’re still playing up to their strengths.
1) Tomorrow; 2) African Air; 3) Child Is My Name; 4) Night After Night; 5) View from the Sea; 6) Drown Little Child; 7) Teeth; 8) Disbelief; 9) Slowed Down; 10) Without Listening
Fresh, exciting, wonderfully melodic. A classic, scene-setting debut.
The late 90s were a fertile breeding ground
for brand new Finnish talent. Maybe it was something in the water or
maybe it was the influence from what was happening in the UK and the US
breaking through to the Nordic consciousness, but it suddenly felt like
anything was possible and the groundroots music scene started bursting
with new names taking lessons from English-language rock and adapting
the sound into the Finnish mindset. It was mostly bubbling under the
mainstream of course – lots of critical acclaim and countless small
names becoming cult classics overnight to be treasured forevermore in
scene-centric box sets, but no real presence on the airwaves over the
more experienced, foreign peers. Which was fine; it gave the scene a
chance to develop without pressure and grow slowly through the internet
and music shows on small-time cable channels.
When they first debuted, Kemopetrol
sounded completely unique to the Finnish landscape and in retrospect,
can comfortably be attributed to be the icebreaker in charge of the new
wave of Finnish music about to take over by storm in the 00s. In the
grand scheme of things they hadn’t developed anything unique – their
debut Slowed Down
is so early 00s zeitgeisty in its sound – but they had two very strong
feats of their own: one, they were Finnish and two, they actually broke
into public consciousness big-time. You could hear them on the radio
with their legitimate hits, you could hear them on the TV with their
music licensed to advertisements, you could actually see their name in
the headlines. They spearheaded the movement breaking new ground and
while I’m sure it would have happened later on anyway through other
means, I genuinely attribute Kemopetrol with not only helping Finnish
indie to become popular, but also helping to shape the sound of Finnish
pop music in the new millennium. There’s a direct line starting from
here and going through a range of acts from indie darlings like Husky Rescue to latter-day mainstream pop such as Chisu.
Slowed
Down, then, is a bit of classic record. It’s not just a famous in its
general cultural relevance as described above, but it’s also somewhat of
a magnum opus for the band themselves. It didn’t have the biggest
mainstream impact out of the band’s albums (that award goes to the
follow-up Everything’s Fine)
and there’s something noteworthy to say about the band’s ability to
change and re-invent themselves a number of times later on, but it’s
here where the biggest impact lies. To wit, it has “Child Is My Name”:
the band’s inarguable signature tune, the song that got them recognised
in the first place and a cut that still remains remarkably captivating
to the point of never failing to seize the attention when it plays. It’s
a perfect match of an outstanding melody that feels huge without ever
directly actually sounding so, a killer bass riff, a deep production
that gives them both an otherwordly tone and a set of suitably vague
lyrics that probably sound deeper than what they actually are, but which
suit the tone of the music spectacularly. It is, in itself, one of
those songs that make the album it resides in worth a mention. It also
doesn’t even begin to describe what the album itself actually is. Slowed
Down is very much a mongrel album – a mixture of sounds so apart from
eachother that it would be bafflingly bizarre if not for the fact that
somehow, somehow, Kemopetrol actually managed to
marry them together. The ten songs scatter between Britpop both at its
breeziest and most upbeat as well as its angriest and angstiest while
taking a dip down in dub and making eye contact with trip-hop,
eventually finishing the album in a happy-dappy rave-out because why the
hell not at this point. It’s sometimes a little jarring – the
metal-riffic “Drown Little Girl” as a prime example – but to their
credit the band make it work. A large part of this is due to the
production. While the songs may come from altogether different places,
they’re all treated the same sonically and the same rules are applied to
each of them. It helps to tie down the songs and make it feel like they
belong together, showing off Kemopetrol as a band who simply have a
wide range of influences rather than one that haphazardly aims
everywhere in confusion. There’s of course singer Laura Närhi’s voice
too. She doesn’t have the strongest set of pipes but her tone is perfect
for the music and she never really alters it across the album, which
once again acts as a binding glue rather than as a flaw. There’s a bit
of a Finnish twang to it but it’s strangely charming in its own right.
Each
of the ten songs also stand out, partially obviously because of how
different they sound but also in terms of sheer songwriting. There’s
that cliché about bands having a lifetime to perfect their debuts and
being able to capture themselves at their purest in their first
releases, and it’s a cliché I have an aversion towards for a number of
reasons, but there’s a hint of truth to it and it’s albums like Slowed
Down that make a good case for it. Each song in Slowed Down is not only
really solid as tunes but they all have a certain ambition and energy to
them that could only come from a young band wanting to take on the
world and not knowing any better. Each song acts as a bit of a
mini-statement of its own, whether it’s the pop/rock could-be-hits ready
to conquer the radiowaves (“Tomorrow”, “Night After Night”), the deeper,
more atmospheric cuts (“Slowed Down”, “Teeth”, “African Air”) or the
parts where it’s incredibly obvious that someone was listening to a lot
of British rock music in the late 90s (“View from the Sea”, “Drown
Little Girl”). They all want to captivate the listener completely as
much as the last song tried to, attempting to build new worlds from
scratch every time the track number switches to the next. Most of the
album succeeds in it pretty well – it’s all damn good music and while
the style-hopping can cause some of the tracks to get buried in the
chaos for a while, it’s never for good. For all its varied sounds,
Slowed Down is tight.
What actually
edges the album from great to classic are three cuts in particular.
“Child Is My Name” we’ve already talked about but it’s worth an essay in
itself if one were so inclined and definitely
at least deserves another direction mention here. “Without Listening” is
a tour-de-force closer that finishes the album in a way that it
deserves: by making absolutely no sense compared to anything that came
before, with its space discoteque vibe bearing no resemblance to
anything else here, but sounding so exuberant and passionately joyous
that it’s clear the band were having the time of their lives when they
were given a chance to record their music. Then there’s “Disbelief” –
quite possibly the best thing Kemopetrol have ever committed to tape, no
matter how brilliant “Child Is My Name” is. It’s a five-minute trip
through hazily dreamy soundscapes, pop perfection melodies, soaringly
spacey guitars and bursts of energy that break through the dreaminess
and take the song to warp speed. It’s a huge song that starts so
benignly but ends up somewhere completely different: a proper journey
encapsulated into a pop song. It’s special, genuinely special. Where the
rest of the album is a strong collection of songs on its own, it’s
these three songs that really make the case why Kemopetrol were the ones
to make an impact in the larger scale: you needed a band who were able
to tap into something special like this to be able to reach out.
And
reach out they did, both to the general audience and to myself, and
Slowed Down still continues to do so. It’s definitely an album very tied
down to what the music world was up to at the turn of the millennium,
almost like acting as the marriage between the British strain of
pop/rock that was everywhere at the time and the downtempo atmospherics
that would soon begin their climb to relevance. But it’s not aged in the
slightest and if anything, the time between then and now has only made
it more obvious that the album’s success was due to its great songs, not
because of any particular external factors. There’s also the context
that comes from knowing the rest of Kemopetrol’s journey. While the
nature of those albums will be tackled on their in their own reviews,
the gist is that the band became more precise and polished in their
execution with time and while that’s not a bad trait in itself by any
means, a part of why Slowed Down sounds a little bit more special is
because it’s still a bit aloof and imprecise: there’s a type of untamed
nature to it that gives it life, the backbone of the music being the
still-youthful energy of a young band unafraid and eager. It has
character. Combine it with the songwriting and the sound, and even when
you strip away all the contextual and cultural bobbins the underlining
message is clear: Slowed Down is a great, varied and inspired album that
would’ve been a landmark release even if it had stayed bubbling under
in its own scene.
