This album is a mixture of musical traditions and cultures. Seremonia are from Finland and sing in Finnish but play 70s style psychedelic hard rock.
The mysterious electronic opening belies what is to come. From the second track “Uhrisuhla” the fare is decidedly of an old rock style. As this warped piece of psychedelia floated along, I could picture long beards and US bands like Canned Heat and Lynyrd Skynyrd and hippies around camp fires. Yet somewhere there is also the rhythm of the Kinks’s “All Day and All of the Night”. The vocals are sung by a female with a velvety voice.
Strange, and stranger as “Rock n Rollin Maailma” pumps on in that 40 year old rock style. The singer has a good voice but she flattens it as if doing a Kraftwerk cover. The sound is deliberately under-produced. “Rock N Rollin Maailma” isn’t a bad song but it’s understated and in common with all of this, it’s distant and dispassionate. “Ghoulish hard rock” is what they call it. I’m not sure whether we need this blast from the past. At least “Aamuruskon Kaupunki” got me thinking. This doomy retro piece is like something from the Old Grey Whistle Test. The singer’s shrill voice makes her sound child-like. It’s an altogether pretty dreadful song which aims at atmosphere and doesn’t find it. Yet I then found myself digging it (let’s use the correct vernacular here) as we’re taken into a bedazzling psychedelic world.
We find ourselves somewhere between Hawkwind and an instrumental version of Arthur Brown’s “Fire”. To follow is a stirring track, the fast but strange “Kosimen Ruumisaunu”. There’s a good use of keyboards. By contrast, the following track “Lusifern Käärmeet” sounds as if all potential atmosphere has been sucked out of it in the search for raw, and ultimately terrible, sound. It’s a dreadful song lacking in melody or purpose. It gets going towards the end when it embarks upon a wild trip but it’s not a very exciting one. “Antikristus 666” aspires to mystery but is largely unfathomable. The drummer comes out with credit but the old rock style chorus is flat, repetitive and dull. After some welcome and serious electronica, we return to the same old, slow rock style with repetitive and insistent guitar playing on “Hautakiven Varjossa”. The singer’s voice is even, but not used to best advantage. The haunting sound of the flute comes in and generates a real atmosphere. Like the psychedelic ending of “Aamuruskon Kaupunki” earlier on, the way this is inserted almost as an afterthought, it was an opportunity missed. It did at least provide a splendid ending to the album.
Whilst I have no problem with the lyrics being in Finnish, the desultory nature of the language or maybe culture and the fuzzy, understated sound didn’t help the cause. It doesn’t really work in my book. Yet there were moments of interest, especially the hippie flute and the occasional psychedelic excursions. Ultimately though I couldn’t really see the point of “Seremonia”, and am sure I would find equal or greater satisfaction looking at old Whistle Test clips or other footage.
(5 / 10 Andrew Doherty)
Leave a Reply