Ismo Alanko – Alangolla (1997)

Ismo Alanko is a famous Finnish musician whose career started in the early 1980's and whose music has had a huge influence in Finnish music scene ever since. He has played in numerous bands that have represented very different styles and genres. Over and over again, he has managed to renew himself and all the different styles have found interested audiences. Alangolla is his 4 CD compilation box that includes the greatest hits from his first two bands and his solo career. The other two CDs are a collection of rarities and B-sides, including some live recordings. This box is not in its entirety on Spotify, so I have just compiled a playlist with most of the songs. The first band of his, Hassisen Kone draws its influences from early 80's post-punk scene. The second band, Sielun Veljet, mixes many different influences variating from new wave to shamanistic world music and to psychedelic rock. His solo career on the other hand has been praised for his witty lyrics and the styles range from folk to rock.



I was a huge fan of Ismo Alanko and all of his bands when I was a teenager. He's one of the coolest Finnish musicians of all times. I particularly remember one week in the summer at a summer cottage where I didn't really want to be because all of my friends were left behind in the city, when I listened to this compilation over and over again. In that same year, we had to read a few books for our Finnish lessons during the summer. I was reading Mika Waltari's book Sinuhe that made a huge impression on me. Still, whenever I think about the book, for some reason I'm reminded of Alanko's song Extaasiin and I'm also thinking about the book whenever I hear the song.

Many of my friends also were really into Ismo Alanko and I saw him perform live quite a few times in my teenage years at various music festivals and also at clubs in Helsinki. His live shows were always really good. His song, Rappiolla, was probably the most famous song from his career and at some point he had become tired of playing that song live, but the last time I saw Ismo Alanko live at a music festival, he played it live, because he said he had understood that as a performer he shouldn't judge people of liking his song even if he had grown tired of that song himself, so he decided to start playing that again.

Personally, I like Hassisen Kone the most of all Alanko's bands. This band is one of the few 80's bands from Finland that I'm not ashamed to listen to. They really had quite amazing songs and they were probably the only band to make world-class post-punk in Finland.

I've played a lot of Alanko's solo career songs myself on a guitar. Especially the folky pop song Nuorena syntynyt was a regular in my repertoire back in the day. Now, many years later, I was listening to that song and I was listening to it from a different perspective. I was thinking about the lyrics and how much national vocabulary there is in those Finnish lyrics. It would be impossible to translate that stuff to anyone, because they would have to have knowledge of the shared history of Finnish people to understand all the references.

Ismo Alanko has since this CD box made numerous other good albums and he has had at least two other bands since. I hope he keeps on making music as long as he can, because he seems to always make something that I like, even if I don't listen to his music that regularly anymore.

Listen to the album on Spotify.