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Written in fRoots issue 374/375, Aug/Sept 2014


SVÄNG
Karja-La
Galileo GMC061 (2014)

Four slightly droll-looking besuited blokes clutching harmonicas in ring-blinged knuckles, but Sväng are no Finnish reincarnation of a music-hall novelty act.
     On this fifth CD they’re still making big strides. Big, rich and varied far beyond the honky-chuff one might expect are the sounds Jouko Kyhälä, Eero Grundström and Eero Turkka get out of ingeniously mic’d chromatic and diatonic harmonicas, Kyhälä’s keyed Hohner Harmonetta, and punch-chugging under it all Pasi Leino’s bass harmonica, which isn’t acoustically very loud but gains a huge depth and punch by the band’s carefully devised close-mic-ing systems.
     I’m lost in mystification and respect for how they put together these fearsomely smart arrangements of their own compositions and make them so alive and natural.
     These are instrumentals that speak. From Eero Grundström’s opener Schengen, inspired by a tune played by a pair of Romanian buskers in frozen Helsinki, through tracks including Jouko Kyhälä’s march and brisk polska for the wedding of Eero Turkka and his Bulgarian wife Neda, Turkka’s surging Eksyneen Tango in memory of getting lost at night in a military area near Neda’s home village, Jeppo’s coupling of Finnish-Swedish march and minuet, Turkka’s nod to rakija intoxication and Howlin’ Wolf, Kyhälä’s dark Kyytiläinen – The Captured Passenger reflecting the ugliness of Finland’s post-independence civil war as reflected in his family history, Grundström’s lyrical tribute, Impivaara, to the Finnish spirit of escapism and national romantics such as Aleksis Kivi, Jean Sibelius, and, to finish, the titular quadrille, also by Grundström, an imagination of a non-border-divided utopia in Karelia, the heartland of kantele, jouhikko, runolaulu and Kalevala.

www.galileo-mc.de, UK distributor www.discovery-records.com



© 2014 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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