evil of banality

 

Laura and I went record shopping on Saturday and got a lot of great stuff. Still sifting through it (well I am, I won't speak for her). 

This is a suitably banal observation but I'll make it anyway, while I drink coffee and eat chocolate in a short break from writing comments on a frustrating masters thesis draft: Crazy Horse were (are?) a great band, don't worry, they are great players with a really appealing rough, edgy skill that makes you always feel like they are just about to fail. When they are not playing Neil Young songs and writing/playing their own songs, they are every bit as great in the playing, and the music is rich and varied and dynamic and intense. But the lyrics fucking suck the proverbial big turd in the mud. They're not weird, they're not lazy exactly, they're just intensely generic. 

I often wonder whether people who write terrible lyrics like this think the lyrics aren't important, or arguably worse, they think their lyrics are fucking awesome and touch on a core truth by their very essentiality. 

I just imagine Crazy Horse, about whom I basically know nothing, in the studio sweating over these bullshit lyrics, looking at each other with sincere eyes (and then the rest of the time talking about balling chicks they hate, I bet). They have already by this stage spent an inordinate amount of time with NY and recorded one of the all-time great albums in Everyone Knows This is Nowhere, so for fuck's sake, why don't they get that you have to put a little bit of thought into what you're saying?! 

I could quote bits, but they're not worth it. 

I will say that other bands-with-amazing-singer-songwriters-at-the-helm-who-made-whatever-the-opposite-of-a-solo-album-is-that-is-a-band-album-without-the-main-person haven't had this problem necessarily - I really love the Sensational Alex Harvey Band album without Alex, for instance and groups like Buzzcocks and Depeche Mode have done masterfully following the departure of their 'main man'. So what the hell Crazy Horse. Lift your fuckin' game. 

Backpedal: I had a few more listens (so, apart from anything else, it can't have been that objectionable) and really there's only one song that totally winds me up. It's called 'Kind of Woman' and it should be shot. The rest is manageable. 

litku klemetti

This is the Litku Klemetti album coming out next month. It's called Asiatonta oleskelua which means 'Unauthorised stay'

I must have written about Litku Klemetti here at some point but I find that my 2022 interest in contemporary indie Finnish pop music has kind of grown me a new portion of brain (possibly it is a tumour) where the meagre information I have been able to glean about various artists and releases have been piling up unprocessed like detritus on the forest floor except that does kind of get processed, by microorganisms. Well, Litku Klemetti has/have become something of a key interest in the last few months and I am going to try and explain why.

Firstly, the has/have - I noticed while filing away a couple of Litku Klemetti albums (between King Snake Roost and Kolla Kestäa) that I was missing one. I found it under L. So clearly I have had different ideas at different times. Apparently Sanna Klemetti adopted the nickname Litku (which means 'slop' or something like that) at some point and started a band called Litku Klemetti and Tuntematon Numero, and made a couple of albums with that name, then became just Litku Klemetti a few albums ago. So of course it would be entirely legit to file the records under L or K really. I have presently settled on K. I mean I have Alice Cooper (the band) and Alice Cooper (the man) albums both filed under C. What I will do if I ever get any Litku Klemetti and Tuntematon Numero albums? Great question, thanks, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Those albums are presently extremely hard to get so I don't have that problem right now. I mean my Neil Young and Crazy Horse albums are filed under Y not N, so maybe nothing will change. 

I don't know why those earlier albums are hard to find except perhaps that Litku Klemetti has kind of 'taken off' but also it might have something to do with the fact that she/they seem to have changed labels for the new album (depicted above) and maybe that's the reason why the earlier records are listed on the Luova records website but most of them are not presently available. 

So I have three Litku Klemetti albums: Taika Tapahtuu ('Magic Happens'), from 2018; Ding Ding Dong (going to assume that title is more or less self-explanatory though who really knows), from 2019 and Kukkia Muovipussissa ('Flowers in a Plastic Bag') from 2021. Wikipedia tells me (there is, amazingly, an English language Litku Klemetti wikipedia page) that Sanna Klemetti grew up in the far west of Finland (in Kuhmo, which must be a tiny town because the whole province of that name has less than 8000 people in it) listening to prog rock albums she borrowed from the library. I have no idea what her records prior to Taika Tapahtuu sound like (will probably find out eventually, they're all on spotify) but that record does have a distinct prog feeling to it, in a Keith Emerson way. But Ding Ding Dong is much more pop and Kukkia Muovipussissa is very eurodisco or perhaps just discodisco in style. They are all really good. 

I was amazed to see when looking through pictures from my Finnish trip in late 2019 that I came across a cassette of Ding Ding Dong in that branch of Levykauppa Äx in Oulu near the railway station and was sufficiently struck by its aesthetic to photograph it (but not to buy it). 

Instead what I did buy was the first Hello People album and made this humorous photograph with it in my hotel bed. 

Anyway, back to LK. The next step is to figure out what the songs are about. This is dangerous as I might decide I don't want to like them anymore because they're about terrible things. Intriguing. 

This leads to another thing that really interests me.  What's the politics in Finland (population five and a half million) of making records only in Finnish? I mean, I come from a sparsely populated country, but 5.5 million is about half a million more people than live in the city I live in, and substantially less (by a million) than the amount of people in this state. I'm not saying that's per se important I'm just intrigued about the way that writing/singing/performing in your own language must on the one hand limit your audience in world terms while possibly also boosting your audience in the sense that, firstly, it's surely nice to hear things expressed in your own language, and secondly, along the lines of that advertising banner that used to (and may still) be on the side of that building at the western end of the Eastern Freeway: 'Buy Australian - if we don't, who will?'. I have previously mentioned in writing about my other major Finnish preoccupation Pintandwefall that they sing in English, very well, but do not appear to have tried to capitalise on this at all - i.e. all their records are released only in Finland and they have played only a handful of shows outside Finland, and none in English-speaking territories as far as I know. 

So I don't get it but my foot really hurts so I'm going to stop writing now.