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. 

pere ubu terminal tower and ninni forever band uusi yhtye

 

So I was crowing a few weeks ago about how I didn't buy a copy of Modern Dance when it was offered to me by the universe but what I didn't mention was that, spare prick that I am, I did then go and buy a copy of Terminal Tower which is the 1985 compilation of most of their non-LP material up to that point. I bought this when it came out but somehow lost track of that copy. It's a pretty great album, not least because it covers the gamut of the first iteration's trajectory from rock outliers to anything goes experimentalists (and a stab at something like pop, the first of their real 'well, this could be an insane novelty hit record like Renee and Renato or something' records). 

I'm listening to it now and realise that only one of my speakers is working, so I'm getting an interesting remix of the overall and hearing things I never realised were there before, percussion/guitar overdub bits that were obviously always part of my experience of these recordings but they're now a lot more prominent and while I am not thrilled by the prospect of fixing the speaker shizzle I'm finding it an experience right now.

My other great listen during the week has been Ninni Forever Band, specifically their album Uusi Yhtye which has some absolute standout tracks on it (the big hits are 'Söin Auringon' and 'Tää Ääni'). Ninni is Ninni Luhtasaari who is also known as Dumb Pint in, yes, sorry, Pintandwefall but here the songs are in Finnish. I am very up for that. One of the songs is called 'Foliopallo' which means 'foil ball' which is hard to resist. I know you're not interested but whatever, I'm not being paid by the word here. 

'Uusi Yhtye' means 'new band' but they had been a band for ten years by the time this came out, so lol. I see their first album is available from a Finnish vendor who can also supply me with all the Bogart Co. records I could want. It's probably time for me to put the computer away for now.

congratulations on adding to your collection

...that's what discogs says when you buy some record or other on discogs. I hate it. I don't think of myself as having a 'collection'. But I am also aware of how I have developed, bizarrely really, a big fat record 'collection' again in the last few years, almost despite myself. When I helped to make the Broadway album in, um, 2016 or thereabouts, or was it earlier, I funded the recording primarily from selling my albums, getting a few hundred dollars at a time. I don't even remember what they were. It wasn't indiscriminate selling, and there are some I would never part with, but essentially I was like 'I don't care about albums that much, and I'm downsizing anyway - what difference does it make'. Somewhere along the way I've started building it all back up again, but very different. There's a lot more non-English speaking stuff in there, which builds on a few bits and pieces I've long treasured like Skaldowie, with amazing things like Barbara, and all those incredible Awesome Tapes from Africa LPs. Oddly enough while I love a lot of records from Finland they are often in English eg Tasavallan Presidentti and did I ever mention I kind of like this group called Pintandwefall? But I am also getting into Litku Klemetti, her songs are in Finnish, remind me to tell you about her sometime. 

Anyway this evening I saw this advertised and I was like, hmm. I don't have a copy of The Modern Dance  and this one is white lol. I could easily have nabbed it 'for my collection'. But I kind of like being a massive PU fan but not owning the album everybody who doesn't know anything thinks is their best. I do have two copies of Art of Walking though, you know, the one that was supposedly a mispress of an earlier iteration, and the other one. I'm the only person who likes that album. It is the greatest though. It fucks, as young people say. 

So I am in a way interested in what the artefacts you do and don't accumulate say about you. Not you. Well, maybe you. I also don't have any records by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Genesis, The Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd, Kate Bush, Fleetwood Mac, Queen, AC/DC or Michael Jackson. Now you won't want to come round when I ask you over to listen to records will you! You know it'll end up being a procession of Pintandwefall sides mixed with the Bee Gees. Ugly. 

5 shiel st north melbourne and the time is right for romans, baby

This building is coming down rapidly in Shiel St. If I lived in those flats behind, facing east, I'd be a bit concerned about what was going to replace it. Well I'd be massively concerned. 

The place was never functioning as anything all the time I've lived here which tbf isn't a massively long period of time. People used to use its forecourt to park in in ways that looked like they were parking each other in. More strangely than that, there are often people waiting in cars in the street immediately outside. 

In other news I have to confess my Pintandwefall obsession has only grown, after a brief pivot to renewing my acquaintance with Big Star. I got another Pintandwefall album in the mail last week, the first one they released on vinyl I think. 

It's called Time is Right for Romans, Baby and it takes that obscure pun a little further by including a drawing of a centurion on the lyric sheet but that's it (otherwise, the actual song that starts the album is called 'Time is Right for Romance'). So you assume that the whole thing is some kind of tossed-off in-joke, which by the way I've never been against from an artist. Oddly TIRFRB isn't streamable, I think possibly their only album that isn't, yet it features at least a couple of songs for which they made videos (there's also a ten-minute Youtube video called The Making of Time is Right for Romans, Baby which is intriguing but entirely in Finnish, so, unintelligible to me). TIRFRB is, on preliminary listens, more rugged and seems to push the envelope a little lyrically (songs that seem to be about domestic violence etc though don't quote me on that). But then I flipped it over to side B once and I was taken aback - it seems like the second side of the album is a real departure in terms of sound and style and is going to take time to absorb. Will report, hold your breath.

At the age of 57 one is meant to not get heavily into new music (by which I mean music made after the time you turned 25) and this album in any case is from 2011 but also I am consistently in awe of their 2022 album Seventh Baby which I can't stop playing either. In fact it's basically an ongoing competition to decide which of the four Pintandwefall LPs I own is going to get played today (and right now I'm exploring another I have never heard, Be My Baby from 2013, on spotify). 

For the last few days I've actually been getting to know the first one I got, Red and Blue Baby, which was released in 2017, better. I liked it well enough when I got it, enough to also purchase Seventh Baby which I instantly thought was far superior (my real major objection to RABB is that it has a song about a killer dolphin, called 'Killer Dolphin', which really gets up my nose). There were elements of RABB which just sounded kind of affected to me and perhaps even like they were trying to paper over the cracks of being slightly uninspired, by overdoing the gothic / histrionic vocals (eg the ending of 'Yours', which is just a silly rave-up). But I've made peace with it now. 

I have to admit a major component of my intrigue here is why isn't this band massively huge?! Why aren't they, like, touring the world every other year at a (say) Courtney Barnett level, appearing on late night TV in the US like CB has? The actual possibility (I may have countenanced this here already, sorry if so) is that they might sound massively like a whole slew of bands, they're just an example of something, and so they're purveyors of a product that you can get more easily in other ways and there's nothing too special about them. Maybe I just don't know that some group / bunch of artists already do this, arguably better, because I am so removed from the mainstream (or the mainstream of whatever now passes for 'alternative') that I don't know about its breadth and capacity. Another possibility is that Pintandwefall are drawing on the same basic musical styles and sounds that I liked as a child (and as mentioned previously, they do throw in that reference to the first Magazine album on the cover of their most recent record, which suggests not only an awareness of the past but extremely good taste) and I take on these retro tropes as manifestations of something new. Ugh, I don't know. 

It's interesting that all their songs are in English too which is obviously something that you do when you think you're going to go places internationally, but from what I can see they've only played about three shows internationally - a couple in Germany ten years ago and one in St Petersburg a few years before that. Weird, weird, weird. 

I mean they're not a 'hot new group' like Wet Leg or whatever, they've been around for 15 years or more, they are clearly ensconced in their particular scene, which btw is I think centred around Tampere? Which goes to show that when I was in Tampere for a month in 2016 and trying to figure out (not very concertedly, it's true) what constituted the 'scene' there and getting nowhere, there was a lot more going on than I could glean. 

Anyway I am sure at some time soon the scales will fall from my eyes, which will be completely disgusting, and when you have non-scaly eyes suddenly you can see again, and what you see is the scales that just fell, presumably on the ground around you or on the table or whatever, gelatinous as I imagine them but drying out, and you are like, I will have to clean this up, and then you'd be thinking, fucking hell, should I keep these scales and take them to the doctor because we should probably get them analysed in case I grow eye scales again? Then again, scales are always falling from people's eyes, maybe it's a common enough problem that the doctor would just know how to deal with it and anyway it's possibly simply a waiting game - scales will fall from your eyes eventually. The whole thing makes me feel queasy. I don't think I have eye scales but none so blind as those who will not acknowledge eye scales. 

pintandwefall - your stories, baby

I mean just in case I was in any doubt that I was in some kind of shitty matrix where my own brain was being used to create its own 'favourite band' here is the second most recent Pintandwefall album, Your Stories Baby, from 2020. It has their most absolutely commercial (?) song on it. It also has an opener called 'Titanic' which is brilliant not just for the mental lyrics 'sometimes we do quote the odd Titanic line back and forth' and more, but also the best worst / worst best guitar solo ever... 

I don't feel comparisons do them (or anyone usually) justice, but they do remind me very much of the Undertones, not only in the remarkable pop tunes and very funny lyrics which are wry without being overly intellectual or referential to anything (except I suppose Titanic), and just seem to look at pop a whole new way. Lovingly, but at arm's length. 

I don't know how far back I want to go into their catalogue because while I really love the third most recent, Red and Blue Baby, the older records seem a lot more sort of grungy? Or maybe I should go there and let it work magic on me, which it might. I have purchased a copy of the 2011 Time is Right for Romans, Baby so I guess we'll see. 

(Or I could buy a CD copy of their second album for a mere euro! What could go wrong)

it's just weird though

For the last few weeks that song 'Constant Craving' has been in my head at very odd times. No, I don't have a constant craving for anything, so that's not the reason. It's one of the songs that I guess come under the category of earworm for me but it's so everyday and shrug-offable that I am used to it. In truth there are umpteen such songs attending me every day, just hummable pop, which I ignore or confront. It's really strange to be honest but I deal with it. 

But actually at the moment I have a complete 100% obsession with this album:

This band has all the core elements that I have always wanted from music - very catchy songs, variety, and oodles of humour. I'll get this out of the way right now too - they have great taste themselves, as evidenced by throwing a Magazine album (and the first and also best Madonna album - maybe someone's an alphabetiser like me?) into their Sgt-Pepper-lite album cover. 

Right now my favourite song on Seventh Baby is the second song on side 1, it's improbably catchy (improbable because the music is pretty pedestrian in the verse but the chorus has this crazy one-note bass and a particularly exceptional guitar solo towards the end) and it's called 'Annabella'. Musically the ultimate effect is tremendous and quite dynamic but the best thing is that lyrically it's ludicrously meta - so it's not about anyone called Annabella, it's one of the band members (they all write songs and they all sing I think, but they credit all songs to the group, so there's no clue whether it's Crazy Pint, Cute Pint, Dumb Pint or Tough Pint who's singing/narrating*) telling the other three about a dream she had: 'I saw a silly dream / about us in the middle of a gig/ we were playing/ a song I didn't know/and you guys rolled around/on the stage and I tried/ to do the same/ and you yelled: "Play Annabella!"'

Anyway since my new music portal closed in about 1985 (later in my life than most people's) I have only rarely latched onto new groups (this group has been going for 16 years but only became known to me by complete accident a couple of months ago) with a proselytising vigour - it happens about once a decade so We Ragazzi at the turn of the century, then the Go! Team I can't quite remember when but that's been ongoing for a long time - they put out their first album in 2004 and that's when I probably saw a few of their videos on Rage and couldn't get them out of my head - now this. Obviously this could be a flash in the pan and in a few months I might be Pintandwewho? particularly when it comes out that they are all fascists or something. But at the moment I am absolutely delighted to still be getting great pleasure out of a new record/band. I have the album before this coming to me in the mail and I'm trying not to listen to it too much on spotifuck beforehand. 

*Actually there is a clue. The lyrics on the sleeve are written in four different hands, so 'Annabella' for instance is written by the same person who wrote 'Hard Work' and I think also, relevantly, 'Clues'. 

pintandwefall

I'm listening to the Pintandewefall album I got in the mail the other day, as per earlier post. This is exactly the kind of band I enjoy, in almost all ways (ok, so sometimes the videos go a teensy bit goth, that's all I'm bothered about, but I can change). When I first came across them (and I don't remember how I did, though they did release this album on Svart which is a label I've bought a few things from - except - it releases a lot of dodgy grindcore or whatever it's called, I don't even know what it's called, I'm sure it's totally superior in the genre but it's not a genre I like or understand, it also puts out a lot of terrific punk and prog reissues, I mean, it's a superior label) I somehow had the weird idea that they were a band of men with a somewhat pixieish 'girl' (woman) singer, and there was something about that vibe that bothered me, but all I can say about that strange impression is that I must just not have been paying attention at all, because they are actually a band of all women. I gather they all write songs and all sing (?) and they have absurd stage names (see above) and they all play in other bands as well and solo projects. I wonder if they also have day jobs. I can see this being the beginning of something big. I mean it could be. They just put out another album in February, I've already ordered it, I have a feeling I'm going to collect the set. 

All their albums have the word 'baby' in the title. I love the cover of this one which is called Wow! What Was That, Baby? 

This is the new album:

What can I say, I'm a finnophile. 

Don't worry, I won't play their records when you come over (much).

end of an ear

 

...and you know, just when you think your covid has basically left you, then you start to feel its influence on you again, so I shouldn't be exposing myself to frankly brutal things like this record, which is not a sweet record but a bit of a bludgeoning one. Robert Wyatt was sacked from Soft Machine I think because they didn't like his lyrics/vocals, which were of course almost always the best thing, and because they wanted to turn shit and he was getting in the way. But it seems he took it fairly hard and decided to make a record without lyrics, and a minimum of vocals. I don't get it. What I also don't get is I had very fond memories of this record but listening to it now it doesn't sound the way I remember it at all. 

The Pintandwefall album however is a different kettle of fish, a bit like the Monks and Heart and gosh, I don't know who else, I need to think about it. 

In between I listened to another record that came today, Manfred Krug's Greens which is a bit of a disappointment because so much of it is in English, but also has a lot to recommend it in terms of being funny and upbeat. He does covers of great songs like Gilbert O'Sullivan's 'Alone Again Naturally'. But I will stop writing these bland non-reviews of records now, I think Nancy's attitude to records is the healthiest.

I was thinking today how annoying it was that there aren't fanzines anymore. If I had an extra day in the week I'd make a little fanzine on a regular basis. But I don't. 

shanks

I had a mess up with my owners corporation fees (or they messed up by sending two invoices a month apart - whatever) so I am running on empty a bit $$ wise this fortnight but I will of course survive, but some records I bought in probably February showed up today, which was nice, from Germany. Fairly cheap and a few interestings and a couple of how could it go wrongs and then an old favourite, repurchased. 

I bought Shanks' 1989 album Masterbait because it was a Mayo Thompson production - quite possibly the last record he produced (to date) aside from his own records. OK so I know you want to know what I think of it, since you have certainly not been able to find out what anyone else thinks of it in English anywhere on the www. Well, first of all, I am not sure that I would really be of the opinion that MT had a distinctive production style anyway, though (contrary to what was sometimes said about that Chills album which is a fine piece of work all round) he is a good, clear, straight down the line record producer, IMO. Shanks appear to be in some way in the world of Furtips, another Dutch band of the 80s+ who I enjoy very much. I have a feeling that the Shanks album and its very wearying title (hey, Dutch people, I don't come to your language and make puns about it) is probably for another day, when I am not quite so harrowed by the week, which has been tougher than most. 

I'll tell you about the other records in due season. I'm listening to this one now.