There are parts that bring to mind Yes at their most thrillingly intricate, King Crimson at their heaviest, and Gentle Giant at their most complex. If you’re into skilled musicianship, and you miss the days when music magazines had readers’ poll categories for individual performers, you’ll love what drummer Johannes Kohal, guitar/bass/synth whiz Lasse Luhta, and bassist Dmitry Melet, as well as Lehdontie and Andreas Heino (their very own built-in Ornette Coleman) do here. It’s certainly difficult to re-create that recorded sound in the live environment, but now we can do that, even if there are a lot of instruments and we only have a limited amount of hands.” He adds of the numerous twists and tempo twitches, “We try to keep our songs interesting.
“Yeah,” agrees Lehdontie, who regards his band’s music as “an accumulation of the ideas and overall mentality of 60s and 70s experimental pop, with a modern approach”. It’s just that you have to plough your way through a lot of dense playing to find them. Never fear: there are snatches of melody throughout Ruination’s six tracks. Which one? The flip character behind The Laughing Gnome, or the one who contrived Station to Station? It doesn’t take long to realise that, in the run-up to recording Ruination, Kairon IRSE! spent longer listening to the multipartite epics of Todd Rundgren’s Utopia than they did the pop Runt of I Saw the Light – the swirling, spiralling keyboard arpeggios of the 13-minute Sinister Waters II evoke blissful memories of passages from The Ikon. We knew we were going to like Ruination because one of the pieces of advanced press described it variously as “progressive shoegazing” and “music of the outer spheres” and in one particular standout line compared it to: “an irrevocably mentally unstable Gentle Giant and a severely alcoholic Todd Rundgren having a love child which, after being adopted to Russia, finds himself performing a rock opera in the Ural Mountains.” Todd Rundgren, you say? Ah, but which Todd? It’s like bands who say they’re influenced by David Bowie. For Ruination we didn’t do any gigs before we went into the studio – we were arranging and creating from the start, which is why the song structures are really strict.” “We did lots of gigs before we recorded it so the songs progressed through live jamming. “Our debut album had looser song structures,” explains guitarist Niko Lehdontie. Whereas Ujubasajuba was largely born out of improvisation and jam sessions, Ruination is the result of two years of careful composing, arranging and honing the chaos at Tonehaven Studios, with producer Juho Vanhanen at the helm and Tom Brooke recording and mixing. There are four of them, with assistance in the studio from Andreas Heino (saxophone, clarinet), and make no mistake, Ruination comes from intense, meticulous performing and assembling in the studio.
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