Maailma kohoaa

Unusually for CoO, 2008 turned out to be a quiet year with an album split between themselves and another band, and this short EP. "Maailma Kohoaa" is an early departure for the Finnish black metal / post-punk twosome, twinning together space ambient and spoken voice recordings with the band's usual post-BM garage rock. "Meidän käsissämme" (Finnish for "In our Hands") is a mostly instrumental recording of post-industrial / dark ambient music with a depressed attitude. The mood is of despair and hopelessness as a lone voice, distant and lacking in emotion, chants away in a deep and dark cavern delineated by low moaning drone.

The title track (whose Finnish name means "The World Ascends") begins as a dreamy space ambient piece from which a choir of male and female voices floats towards us, followed by another chanting voice. A major part of the track is taken up by the familiar garage black metal / post-punk melodic rock with vocalist Antti Klemi alternating between fairly clean though off-key singing and more ravaged, almost death-metal growls. Thanks to a muddy production, the band's sound seems vast and forbidding, and the bass sounds huge and heavy; the downside of course is that the singing is muddy as well. The overall effect is a mix of post-punk, weird psychedelia verging on derangement and dark atmosphere.

Although the rock song is fairly typical of CoO's output, the space ambient music and found sound recordings lift the title track into a very different realm, one that combines the utter depths of depression with a feeling of ascending movement and thus of hope. The universe may seem empty and vast and its attitude towards humanity one of indifference as we hurtle towards unknowing self-annihilation so it's up to us as individuals to find meaning in our lives. This EP goes some way to acknowledging the crisis of existence we all face and offering a reason to keep on going through emptiness.