"The Finnish prophets of fictional world music" is the in-their-own-words slogan of the Helsinki-based Alamaailman Vasarat, or "The Hammers of the Underworld." The band has been playing, warping and snapping away at their own kitchen-sink klezmer-etc. style for the last decade, and their newest record, Huuro Kolkko - a concept album based on the little-known life of a half-crazy, half-genius Finnish explorer of the same name - shows them more than comfortably segueing from gritted-teeth cello chugging to theremin meandering to pump organ waltzing all within the same song.
The Hammers are the epitome of words like surprising, whimsical, quirky. Bug-eyed moments populate the music at every corner, drawing the listener in with their supreme musicianship coupled with effortless adventuring. But, as much as they encapsulate these descriptions, they also transcend such clichés, begging for descriptions that go beyond sound and move into image.
The temptation when talking about them is to add to the pile of zany descriptors, an urge I’m trying to ignore, but one that will probably win out in the end. In the meantime, the band does a splendid job of this themselves. Their website cites their genre, and quite rightly, as "kebab-kosher-jazz-film-traffic-punk-music." Their myspace page takes the effluvial adjectives even further saying they sound like, "A poor Chinese immigrant moved to Calcutta for a better life, but finds all the rumours he heard about the graceland to be something else than true. Now he's stuck in a traffic jam in between a million rickshaws."
Basically, The Hammers love a good story, and one that demands attention. It is no surprise then that each track on Huuro Kolkko has a mini-narrative attached to it. Unlike most 'inspired-by' instrumental pieces, the story seems to serve a more-than-complementary role to the music itself, the paragraph descriptions being so specific. While they are worthchecking out for five minutes, the narrative is not needed to let the music bring you, albeit with trepidation, to their faux-realities.
"Mielisaurus" opens the album, with Tuuka Helminen and Marko Manninen wasting no time bringing in the lowest registers of their cellos as they slip and slide down the neck. With attention grabbed, the song moves on adding a stuttering pump organ and guttural contrabass sax to prove that this will not be the kind of record that allows you to think about much else. After three and a half minutes that seem like a time warp, it would be easy to think that the genre hammering will run out of places to smash. But then, "Liskopallo" tramples in with a tango so grisly, the rose in the mouth quickly causes lips to bleed. The wild horns that blast are reminiscent of the skifflings of The Zutons - that is, if the Zutons grew explosive beards and their balls dropped.
From there, it's clear Alamaailman Vasarat is a group of master craftsmen, and that each song will be a marking point for a wildly different aspect of the journey, whether it be the saloon-wandering of "Natiivit" to the somehow-heavier-than-Mastodon outro of "Tujuhuju". In a way, the listener becomes the half-baked Kolkko, exploring and noting worlds previously unseen, only to bring the findings back to civilization and be met with ostracizing doubt of its quizzical existence.
As engrossing as the expedition is, it is not something that you'll want to embark on everyday - that is, though the music is utterly fetching, it might not be added to your "morning run" playlist. But despite this apparent flaw, Huuro Kolkko is worth the global indulgence, if not just for the chance to come up with your own "sounds-like-a-grunting-musk-ox-flipping-pancakes-on-the-French-Riviera" linguistic associations.
-Bryan Parys