THUS: OWLS – cardiac malformation)
(CD, almost musique)
Folk covers a wide range of
musical forms these days (see also the review of Picastro’s “become
secret” album somewhere around here) but this is the way I like
it best: a mysteriously named band with a debut album accompanied by no
information whatsoever popped into the player and suddenly a whole wonderful
world of emotional dynamics and cataclysms pours into the room. There are
spurs of light and heartthrob crossing the room, opening stories and
memories left to peruse or to wither, cranked into the mind by softness. An
elegy followed by a screamed excess and then poured into a chorus of
likeminded despair. The last time this happened to me was The Black Heart
Procession turning their “Amore Del Tropico” into a genius
live set too many years ago. But “cardiac malformation” is very
different, and that is not only due to the female vocals, but probably more
to the hymnal dynamics every other song seems to grow into. Or is sucked
into, who can say?
Thus:Owls are able to take it
to other places as well, like a stormy, percussive swing as on
“Sometimes” with desperate jazz measures thrown in, or the dramatic
storytelling so readily employed and made well known by Frida Hyvonnen on
“climbing the fields of Norway” (the Scandinavian connection does not
really seem to be a coincidence – the bleakness of the cold and dark
northern winters is a legend even around here in the mountains of central
eastern Europe) or even ephemeral dreamy accounts of memories not yet
experienced as the slowly winding “my thoughts ain’t lovely”. Or the
screaming, crashing blurr of noise that is the beginning of “a volcano in
my chest”. But it is these highpoints mentioned above that struck me
personally the deepest. Unlike some of the other, more “regular” songs,
they won’t find their way onto a mixtape of mine, because they need to be
settled in between songs that lead to and from them, otherwise they will
stick out like toothache in a row of regular songs. But in a lot of ways, I
am an album listener mostly, anyway. I like the long format and to compare
the sounds as they evolve from one song to the next and then onwards.
It is a terrible kind of
mystique to fall into a pitch black hole and only find out by intuition. A
friend of mine likes to go ice-diving and she says the worst thing is to
find the hole you went down, you should at least always leave ten minutes
time for it. Because from below everything is a blending, blistering white,
especially on a sunny day. Imagine falling into a frozen lake, if you
don’t manage to stick to the hole, if you go down, there is no way you
will ever find your way out again. And in the ice cold water you have two to
three minutes maximum until your whole body goes numb from the coldness and
you sink down to the bottom to be found again, probably when the springtime
comes. And now imagine that, only with blackness instead of white, and you
get some of the mindset I fall into lately when listening to this kind of
music. Thus:Owls have made it onto my top list for 2010 with this, and it is
only yet February.
