AURE

The Finnish group Plain Fade started recording their second album right after the release of the debut, in 2005, drawing inspiration from the lakeside. Aurejärvi is one of the thousands of our lakes I don't remember ever having heard of, but googling reveals that it locates in Northern parts of Pirkanmaa region, not very far from the band's hometown Tampere. Lies, Sanctions and Cruise Missiles was a dark-toned, melancholic work of Post-Rock (that I associated with the Belgian Battlestations), and on this album the style comes closer to Ambient. The biggest difference is that whereas most of the debut's tracks were rather long and included even violent shifts from calmness to edginess and back, these ten tracks stay mostly in an average length and don't progress that much within themselves.

That makes it easy to tell right away which tracks are accessibly beautiful and which are a bit harder to enjoy because of more dissonant sounds. Vocals are this time completely absent if I remember right. All track titles seem to be names of specific locations on the lake. The main composer in the band is the keyboard player Juho Koivuaho, but this music is based on improvisational sessions by the lake. I think YouTube has one or two tracks from this album. Actually it's quite difficult to capture in words. Here and there I felt some resemblance with the more ambientish parts of 666 by Aphrodite's Child, or early Vangelis such as L'Apocalypse des Animaux. The mood is sort of introvert and thoughtful. There may be no clear highlights that would stick to one's memory, instead the album works as a whole continuum, letting plenty of space for inner images (of untouched nature above anything else, or is this only a presumption evoked by the theme? Well, urban or upbeat this is not!), and it's completely up to the listener how deeply (s)he is taken into that trip.

It's interesting to see that for the third album Antrhopogonia (2011) this group took a whole different direction, teaming with a choir - singing in Ancient Greek! - to make a grandiose concept album. What next?