Tohcoth

It’s tough to review any Aarni album as a cohesive whole, because basically every song sounds different to every other song, and this is true of the latest effort from this Finnish one-man band. Unfortunately, while this is just one of the reasons why previous full-length Bathos is so brilliant, it doesn’t really work nearly as well here.

It’s clear even before pressing play on your stereo that this is going to be an exploration of the bizarre. The quirky cover art, the strange song titles, the rather surprising claim that “all responsibility is hereby transferred to the listener”, and the picture on the disc itself—a rather feminine-looking Cthulhu-like figure wearing red high heels spreads its buttocks for the buyer, the location of the disc’s hole making picking the thing up distinctly disquieting—all of these factors serve to suggest that this is to be no run-of-the-mill experience.

And indeed, this proves to be the case. Although the opening track is a relatively unremarkable clean electric guitar-based exercise in mood-setting, and the first song proper is a fairly straightforward doom piece, albeit with Aarni’s trademark flutes and some strange time signatures, the album as a whole feels like an exercise in being as strange as possible at all times. Take, for example, the song Λογος, which starts out as a rather pleasant piece, based around clean guitars, synths, and clean male (guest) vocals. It’s nothing too shocking, but it’s a fairly pretty listen, until it suddenly cuts into a weird atmospheric section based on electronic drones and noise, with some deep chanting. This new theme is very cool in its own right, with some spacey synths joining later, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs on the same album, let alone in the same song.

It is this tendency towards jarring transitions that is one of the album’s weakest points. Although most of the parts, taken individually, are fairly good to excellent, the manner in which they are juxtaposed often makes it feel like the artist was either haphazardly sticking sections together, or else simply being weird just for its own sake. The result is a patchwork of musical ideas, strung together somewhat amorphously. There is no cohesion not only to the album, but even to the individual songs. People complain about Opeth doing this, but really Aarni is orders of magnitude worse.

Still, despite this fairly key complaint, the release does have its share of great moments. The instrumental track called Riding Down the Miskatonic on a Dead Thing, for example, consists of a number of rather excellent musical sections, ranging from the light and airy to rather crushing sections of doom metal. Although they are strung together a little randomly, the track is a very strong one. The musicianship is good for the most part, in particular the bass which produces some very exciting lines, as for example in the chaotic jams of The Sound of One I Opening. It’s a little sloppy in places, due to the refusal of “M. Warjomaa” to nitpick and retake errors. However if this is accepted, it’s no worse than listening to, say, Burzum, although the music is technically more complex and hence more mistakes are discernable. A lot of it sounds more like a loose jam than a highly-polished studio album, but this isn’t necessarily such a bad thing.

Another standout piece is The Sound of One I Opening, which is a fairly humorously-delivered attack on Abrahamic religion. It’s delivered as a fairly middle-Eastern sounding piece with long, improvisational-sounding instrumental sections. Some of the album’s best lines are contained within, for example “We should believe a Jew girl was fucked by a dove who was really God in disguise… and that half-bird, half-Jew schmuck somehow still spies on us”. A pitch-shifted vocal section near the end adds a new flavour, but it’s not pitch-shifted in the sense that goregrind bands’ vocals tend to be. Instead he appears to have sung the lines in a monotone, and then used pitch-shifting effects to add melody. It’s strange, but it works. A similar technique is later used in the piece Barbelith, where it produces some of my favourite vocals on the release.

Speaking of vocals, however, they are pretty atrocious. They are mainly clean, with some snarls here and there. They are sung in a fairly deep tone—think of Squaring the Circle from the Bathos album—but rarely on-key. Frequently the melody goes too low for him to sing comfortably and he winds up producing a toneless aberration. Although it’s often just something you can get used to, it is really obnoxious sometimes, more or less ruining Arouse Coiled Splendour which would be a fairly good song otherwise, and hurting the thoroughly gloomy atmosphere of All Along The Watchtowers (which is not a Bob Dylan cover, but does open with that song’s chord progression before turning into the cloyingly dark piece it truly is). There is also one other notable vocal style which is only used on The Battle Hymn of the Eristocracy—a piece set to the tune of John Brown’s Body, with lyrics about Discordianism—which is a high falsetto. It’s also pretty weak and amateurish-sounding, but the vocals on this song actually work in a strange kind of way.

So to summarise, this album is filled with sections of great music, but ultimately falls flat due to the haphazard way in which they are put together, the over-the-top strangeness, and the woeful vocals. I wasn’t at all amused the first time I listened to it, but it actually did grow on me significantly, to the extent that I do enjoy it quite a bit. Indeed if I were to rate on enjoyment alone, I would probably award something in the high seventies or low eighties. However, the glaring faults do spoil it somewhat, and I can’t give it that high a score. It is a grower, and many of the faults can be accepted with time, but I wouldn’t recommend this release, save to fan of very bizarre and avant-garde music, or big fans of his previous work.