MERI JA AVARUUS

I hadn't heard of this Finnish band when I borrowed their album from a library two weeks ago. I was charmed by the unique, eclectic blend of their music, and knew at once I'll push them into the PA database. Thanks for the fast process, Prog Folk team! Since I wrote the band bio including an overall music description, I'll go straight to the tracks of this debut album. BTW, because the booklet contains both the Finnish lyrics and their English translations, for your convenience I use the translated track titles here.

'Preludium' is a beautiful solo piano piece with a romantic and impressionistic elegance. Although the line-up info mentions only violin as the instrument of the main composer Pessi Jouste, he's the performer of this piece, according to the booklet. Jouste's next 6-minute composition 'Sunlight Cannot Reach Here' marvelously reveals VIMMA's Eclectic Folk Prog diversity. Mostly instrumental, it reminds me of the Folk Fusion of JUHA KUJANPÄÄ, sounding more progressive in comparison. At 4:47 the female vocalist Eeva Rajakangas starts reading the poem and the music gradually disappears from the background. "We should not have started a war against the nature" is the final line. The album's lyrics are primarily dealing with the critical state of our planet and the fatal greed and ignorance of mankind, but despite being angry at times, I think they are fairly interesting poetry nevertheless.

On 'Cadenza' Pessi Jouste is soloing on violin. Stylistically reminiscent of old composers such as Bach, Vivaldi and Paganini -- but luckily it's not a fast virtuoso number à la Paganini! 'The Eighth Day' features a very intense poetry performance backed by a sharply dynamic musical arrangement, and this is where VIMMA steps into the RIO/Avant Prog territory. Fans of that subgenre will be impressed, although I fully understand if the poetry dominance puts off some listeners. 'A Planet' is composed by the group's pianist Aino Kallio. The vocal delivery is this time better woven into the music which moves from piano centred angular jazz to violin-fronted progressive rock.

On '8.0' (no idea about the meaning of the title) the repetitive poetry performance has a hip-hop flavour while the music is tonally very rich Folk Prog/Fusion. On the hard rocking part especially the drummer Vilho Louhivuori shines. 'A Story' is composed by the bassist Ansku Mellanen. Vocalist-lyricist Eeva Rajakangas proves she also handles the melodic, more ordinary singing with her nice voice. As a prog song this would be a suitable calling card from the album, combining the band's avantgarde side and the more melodic side excitingly. My personal favourite may be the final track 'Water' composed by reeds player Jaakko Arola. For the vocals this is the most melodic of songs, and the composition shifts beautifully between Tull-reminding rhythmic complexity and lyrical serenity.

Upon my initial listening I was admittedly reserved especially for the non-singing poetry performance, but gracefully the album gets more melodic towards the end. The playing is excellent, the instrumentation so rich, and on the scale of uniqueness VIMMA are surely worth the praise. What the hell, I give a full rating!

And while I'm on the subject of how certain groups ever slipped past us and into prog folk, um, it has occurred to me that sometimes we decide they definitely should be somewhere in the database, and, when all the longhairs from fusion, eclectic and RIO say nay, presto they become a prog folk group. Welcome VIMMA (not to be confused with another more easily categorized prog folk outfit also from Finland named VIIMA, oy), meaning "Frenzy", and thank you Matti!

On their debut which translates to "Sea and Space" the blend is somewhere between jazz fusion and world music with classical meanderings in between. Because VIMMA wants to impart morals of importance to them, they sometimes choose to do so in the sultry spoken words of Eeva Rajakangas, and always in the mother tongue. This makes some of the tracks less penetrable to those few of us with limited connections to the Finnish language, but I also note that the best of these are so relatable musically that she could be expounding on any subject in any language and I would follow her. In particular, "Sunlight cannot reach here" recalls the blind harpist O'CAROLAN via the wonders of early CLANNAD with piano replacing the harp, and the mesmerizing "8.0" magically fits anyone who can walk, and maybe a few who thought they couldn't, with dancing shoes for 7 celebratory minutes of fiddle, mouth music, piano, bouncy rhythms, and even guitar crunches. If only it didn't stop. Also worth mentioning are the winds of Jaakko Arola which here and in other tracks recalls a long departed Breton group TI JAZ.

Singular this certainly is, and at its best VIMMA's execution is stunning, but that's not quite often enough to raise their first album to the next level, leaving space for improvement.