Sydän, Sydän – Auto (2005)

As some of you may have noticed, I only just released a blog post on another album by Finnish Sydän, Sydän and I mentioned that I bought that album in a pack with two CDs. This is the other one of those CDs and I think this is far superior to Au. On this album, there is a minimum amount of metal sounds and to me that's usually a really good thing. Especially when the band is so capable of making this kind of more melodic progressive and experimental rock. This was the album that got me interested in Sydän, Sydän. A friend of mine from uni had told me about this band and I was interested in finding out what she was talking about, so I borrowed this album from the library. At first I was just perplexed about the strangeness of the music, but even on that first listen, there were a couple of really good songs, which made me interested in giving this band a chance.



It wasn't until recently when I was listening to my albums for this blog that I actually really enjoyed a wider array of songs from this album. I felt like I finally understood what this band was about. This wasn't helped by the fact that I didn't enjoy Au nearly as much. Anyway, I feel like Auto is the highlight in this band's repertoire and I'm glad to own this album.

The first two songs that really appealed to me on this album were the first song Pappa sanoi, että and the last song Ihmiset ova valloittaneet maailman. I really still like both of these songs. They have some amazing melancholic melodies and somehow very Finnish feelings to them. The fact that these songs sound like rock songs, but they're played with quite lo-fi acoustic sounds, makes them even better. Later on, I've also found couple of other songs on the album that I really like. Kuolema tulee is a great prog rock song with strange melodies and philosophically interesting lyrics. Ei voi olla totta sounds a bit like an old Finnish folk song, but there's some strange kind of prog punk style in the sounds. Also the song changes to completely different song in the middle with lots of maj chords.

The rest of the songs on the album have not by themselves made that big of an impression on me, but they all work to make this album, on the whole, a concise and good album.

The album cover is one of the craziest ones I've ever seen. It looks like someone just scribbled a bit of something on a piece of paper. I wouldn't really be surprised if that actually was how these covers came to be. When these covers are combined with a plastic jewel case CD, it gives a sense of an album that someone just made at home. That's probably intentional.

I don't know how people who don't understand Finnish would take this album and the music on it, but I would really be interested in finding that out.

Listen to the album on Spotify.