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CD Feature/ Karjalan Sissit: "Tanssit on loppu nyt"

  Tobias

It may sound strange, but there is a certain kind of romance in self-destruction. Bukowski and Miller knew it, Jim Morrison and Janice Joplin lived it and just like them, Markus Pesonen is feeding the ugly demons that haunt his dreams. It is cold outside and a man with a wild and decided look in his eyes is weilding an axe – would you listen to Karjallan Sissit’s fourth album alone in the night?

One thing at least is certain from the very first bar and the rolling thunder timpani of “Tää on katastroofi, saatana”: Pesonen is still far from entertaining old ladies on a Sunday morning brunch. Even though we wish him all the best in the world, the petrifying pendulum between pandemonious noise and depressive derges, the self-flagalating exorcism, this music-made testimony of failure is one we wouldn’t want to miss. “Tanssit on loppu nyt” comes packaged in a breathtakingly magnificent digipack with the haptics of an old book just found in a long forgotten treasure chest. You wipe the dust from its cover and discover pictures of forlorn and desolate roads winding their way throug ice-covered landscapes, meetings in lifeless town halls with nothing to say, faces twitching in a combination of ecstasy and torment and, again and again, vodka. Just as much as this record deals with the quasi-political issue of growing up with Finish roots in Sweden, it returns to Pesonens eternal theme of alcoholism. While he treats this topic with an ironic wink of the eye on stage, his studio output dives headlong into the abyss: Mournful electronic string sequences, mutilated melodies and harmonies riding the wave of a thousand tears are broken apart by Markus' dark voice, void of any emotions, telling the story as it is. You may not know what he is talking about, but the message gets across nonetheless. On other occasions, the tension explodes in manically militaristic outbursts of pain and aggression, only to end in a strangely dislocated tango, a lullaby for nightmares come true.

There is no resolution to this eternal struggle, at least not inside the fortfied walls of Karjalan Sissit’s comatose castle. And yet, it does a great job at snubbing the cliché: As a mantra of stubbornly walking on, this album is taking us to places, we wouldn’t want to go. We should be thankful for that, because there is nothing romantic about them if you think about it long enough. Beware of that axe!

By Tobias Fischer

Homepage: Karjalan Sissit
Homepage: Cyclic Law Records