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Paavoharju - Laulu Laakson Kukista
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| Brainwashed |
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Music sounding much like a forlorn music box lost in shadows opens the album and remains a recurring theme throughout, giving the impression of someone lost in nostalgic memories. This is further enhanced by the way the group uses various audio fidelity qualities in their music, with vinyl crackling alongside modern beats suggesting the past merging with the present. Perhaps the album's intentions would be clearer if I understood a word of Finnish, yet not knowing the meaning of the lyrics or titles didn't dampen my enjoyment. The textural variety is a definite highlight, but the album's most important quality is the songs themselves. "Kevätrumpu" is far from the quiet, introspective mood that opens the album. It contains some of the same qualities but uses them to serve a catchy dance song instead. Similarly, both "Uskallan" and "Ursulan Uni" use modern beats as their backbone. There are some tracks that don't rely so much on contemporary technology to get their point across, like the chamber music of "Tuosku Tarttuu Meihin" or the album's sole traditional folk song, "Italialaisella Laivalla." What makes Laulu Laakson Kukista so enjoyable is how the band naturally weaves these disparate elements together. At a little over a half an hour, the album barely qualifies as full-length. Usually that may not be such a big issue in and of itself, but it's a little problematic here because the album has some padding. While the eerie atmospherics tie the music together and make for a consistent mood, the constant revisiting of this theme, especially on the album's last three out of four tracks, detracts somewhat from the album's overall power. Fewer interludes and more songs would have been nice....full text |
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| Cokemachineglow |
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The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to instrumentation is typically associated with lo-fi aesthetics. Paavoharju are out to change that. Even more than the fantastic Yhä Hämärää (2005), Laulu Laakson Kukista translates the homespun psych-folk that distinguishes the Fonal label into near-epic, shockingly lush strokes of impressionist pop. Here also is everything that lies in between classical orchestration and musique concrete; the music of Paavoharju constantly expands and contracts in ways which are humble, majestic, and just out-and-out phenomenal. The fact that the band happens to be part of a mysterious Finnish commune of devout Christians is probably dwelt on too much in reviews, but it’s pertinent in at least one way: how else do you explain something so labored over and yet so earnest and void of pretension, except to say that the band’s channeling something greater than themselves? Suffice it to say speculation about what exactly makes this band so vivid and unlike anything else out there at the moment is bound to produce hypotheses of questionable substance and more than a little delirium, but bear with me—this music is more than worth it. Comparisons to other music are as inevitable as they are insufficient; there’s any number of maverick acts out there that I could compare Paavoharju to. But that comparison would only work to describe a sense of shared ground with other bands that use any and all means to achieve a specific sound. Rather, I’d hazard to say that Paavoharju are one of the first bands to fully incorporate what found-sound masters like Philip Jeck have developed into a pop framework. Which is to say that Laulu Laakson Kukista sounds like fragments of a thousand pop records, but rather than assembling them into a drifting ambient landscape like Jeck the band build these fragments back into pop songs. Now, they don’t try and pass it off as straightforward pop; they allow all the static, disembodied voices and samples, and lost/undiscovered choral etudes to organically coalesce into silken, marmoreal slices of transcendence, and then they allow them to break apart again. For example, the fact that “Kevätrumpu” carries melodies that wouldn’t be out of place on an Annie or Róisín Murphy single is astounding in itself; the fact that the static and backwards AM radio samples are always poised around its Röyksopp-esque production in an almost subliminal way is something like a miracle. The modus operandi of this album, besides attempting to unite virtually every contemporary strain of Scandinavian music from Peter Bjorn & John to Kemialliset Ystävät, could be to show how much even the slickest pop will someday become an artifact. Still, the fact that it’s not—that this is the premeditated, controlled work of a specific group of people (even if the details and credits are somewhat hazy)—is what casts this beast beyond the realm of accidental masterpieces. Leena Uotila’s voice is central, or at least as central as it’s possible to be in a sonic universe where everything is ephemeral, and she sings in crystal-clear soprano, offering up the strange persistence of clarity amidst the blooming chaos of nature. Some of the more pop-oriented tracks feel like lost torch songs, blasting through the fury of static and crumbling instruments as if they needed to announce themselves with unabashed grandeur before they drown in the noise. This quality is equally evident on the tracks where whoever handles the male vocals sings, especially “Uskallan”: opening and closing with the cut-up sound of a baby gasping for air, the track builds into a disco-rhythm with synths alternately smooth and static-drenched threatening to consume the vocals halfway through....full text |
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| Pitchforkmedia |
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For any band with the willingness or capability to write actual tunes, critics and fans are apt to see anything else-- interludes, instrumentals, experiments-- as a digression. I understand and partially accept that this is what you are choosing to do when you are not singing me a song. These are the aural equivalents of John Steinbeck's turtle, often treated with the indifference and puzzlement afforded the itinerant reptile in your average high school book report; folks were known to edit off the ambient bits of even Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album renowned for its meld of song and abstraction. Finnish collective Paavoharju are obstinate in their attempts to buck this trend, scattering Europop, pastel electronics, and woolen drones like a tossed deck of Bicycle playing cards. The greatest achievement of Paavoharju's Laulu Laakson Kukista, though, is not its dexterous balance of song and sound but the way it invests you as heavily in field recordings, dub workouts, and quasi-classical think pieces as in the band's foreign-language hookmaking. Ostensibly a "songs" album, Laulu only gradually reveals their scarcity: count six using the standard "Could I maybe put this on a mixtape for my coworkers if, in fact, my coworkers were into entropic Nordic dance-pop?" benchmark. In place of half of a classic pop album, Laulu doesn't redefine out-music so much as find clever and inventive ways to incorporate it. Like its predecessor-- Paavoharju's 2005 debut Yhä Hämärää-- Laulu opens with "Pimeänkarkelo", a track that ceases to be an "intro" around the two minute mark and carries on for twice that anyway, ultimately serving as a palate cleanser for the surprisingly tart headrush of "Kevätrumpu". Kinetic synths and lovingly cheesed-out drums bleat and whir like dancin' music at a 1992 rollerblade disco. A stressed, sexed female voice coos and circles and punches like she's got Madonna's biceps but not those under-eye bags. And then...variations on a plinky piano melody in the form of "Tuoksu Tarttuu Meihin", which mulls and ponders amid a static curtain. When the band later remembers the melody on the album's two shortest tracks they feel less like interludes and more like rounding back to an earlier conversation after a thorough and fulfilling detour....full text |
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Paavoharju lyrics