Paavoharju - Laulu Laakson Kukista

Paavoharju is a freak folk band from Finland. Their sound is a precise combination of broken chords, acoustic guitars, spiritual choral vocals and digital filters.

classified as "entropic Nordic dance-pop"

"Downtempo dub. Song. Weird pastel electronica. Song. Laulu is structured much like Yhä Hämärää and the line between should be drawn using confidence, or perhaps perseverance. Mulish is too ugly a word for Laulu, whose compositions are stubbornly given room to flower and expand but are always appropriately reined; instead let's say that Paavoharju have a well-developed internal clock, or are otherwise familiar with "The Ugly Duckling". "Kirkonväki" outgrows its watery piano and malfunctioning click-track to blossom into a goth-rock prom, replete with organs in waltz-time stumble. "Uskallan" features a male lead so clear-throated and dramatic that the song sounds like one of the early 90s Latin-American hits that increasingly populate Chicago's jukeboxes. "Sumuvirsi", a rhythm-less, female-led hymn whose second-most prominent sound is a cackling raven, hues closest to the psych-folk traditional to Fonal's roster, but even it seems more theatrical and dramatic, like Paavoharju have been taking their cues both from Eleanoora Rosenholm and high-school drama productions.

The tiny honking synths that augment the rusty guitars of "Tyttö Tanssii" suggest a more literal reading of the Bicycle metaphor from above: a hill of two-wheelers, disheveled rubber, tassels, and bells. Laulu connotes this youth, motion, and playfulness in various states of repair and construction, and it does so by alternating well-formed, multi-faced pop songs with abstract head-scratchers, each component as warmly evocative and strangely necessary as the last. "


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