Artist: Mist Season
Label: Seacrest Oy
Release: 2006
Length: 77:04
Rating: 4.3/5
I don’t intend to waste words on Scandinavians as musicians. Not just these days, but for a long time now, they’ve dominated every genre that knows more than four chords, never mind jazz, (progressive) rock or metal and its more brutal variants, or any mix of the above. The Swedes may have stood out at every level lately, but the Finns keep up with them without breaking a sweat. I’d even go as far as saying the Finns have certain attributes that beat even the Swedes. In Finnish jazz you’ll find the most natural approach to music there is. Jazz is also kind of the easiest way to depict nature, but some manage to present the more active forms of jazz, like fusion, in a completely opposite way, like America’s Niacin do, and synesthetically get all your senses to feel nature.
Mist Season, a Finnish sextet from Hämeenlinne, are one of the leading acts standing as a counterweight to synthetic fusion bands (not that there’s anything wrong with them). Despite the occasional use of electric guitar and keyboards, the musicians manage to create an organic whole that vividly shows exactly what Mist Season want to show: the Finnish landscape and its unspoiled nature of forests and snowy games of the elements. To that end, they weave quite a few Finnish folk and ethnic elements into their music, which of course helps paint a mental picture of snowy Finnish idylls. That’s how their second album “Woodlands” came about, and with 15 tracks it reveals its thematic setting right in the title. The listener wanders through this forest labyrinth for a full 77 minutes, and on the stroll they experience it all: gorgeous morning birdsong from the branches, clumps of snow falling on their head, a scrap with a bear, a handshake with the famous bigfoot. Every now and then the musicians slip from the real into the mythological backdrop of Finland with slightly medieval-inspired arrangements, which only spices up an already varied map of Finland, now not just in space but in time. With instrumental music, the Finns don’t just conjure up a place, they reach into the fourth dimension and set us off on a trip through time.
The songs, from first to last, are simply perfect all the way through the album. Sometimes even too perfect, and on top of that, here and there even naive. There’s no doubt these are extremely gifted musicians, but too often they stay merely pleasant, despite the excellent visual effect their music creates in the listener’s head. They don’t dare step outside their cozy comfort zone and snap a tree or two in their forest, or shoot the rabbit that’s hopping across the white snow without a care in the world. A bit of red would suit that picture just fine here and there. They don’t dare take one step further and risk a move that might wreck the Finnish idyll they’ve set up, because they don’t want to step out of the frame of the real image and into the abstract, which would make Finland so breathtaking that you wouldn’t need photographs or landscape paintings anymore. Their painted Finland may be insanely realistic, with gorgeous motifs, but that’s all it stays. Mist Season’s music gives priority to the informative function, which it should have sacrificed a little for the aesthetic one. It’s certainly impressive that the Finns managed to bring so much mimesis into music, but music is above all abstract and aesthetic, and too much of that has been taken away from it.
Woodlands is still an incredible piece of work that could serve as a model for any jazz and fusion creator. The mosaic of piano, guitar, saxophone, trumpet, drums and bass has no missing pieces in any respect, and whatever potential holes there are get filled by a whole bunch of guest musicians, who fill the emptiness with clarinet, accordion, tabla and flute, adding to the ethnic and folk elements. Everything fits together perfectly, only the final picture isn’t as thrilling as it could have been. Still, Mist Season are one of the most pleasant bands I’ve ever heard. Even when they sink into heavier fusion, their music stays as bright as sunlight glinting off snow and as upbeat as any morning birdsong. So the Finns are definitely for everyone who wants to explore Finnish forests, meet bigfoot and sing dawn songs with the birds, without actually paying for a plane ticket there, and even then the bigfoot meeting is included in the price. That way, it won’t just be your ears and all your other sense organs that thank you, but your wallet too.
Lineup
Keijo Hakala – bass guitar
Timo Kajamies – keyboards
Jukka Pitkänen – trumpet
Kimmo Pörsti – drums, percussion
Kari Rantakallio – saxophone
Tommi Varjola – guitars
Guest musicians:
Asmo Jaakkola – clarinet
Veli-Matti Järvenpää – accordion
Rafael Tejada – tabla
Mikael Berglund – bass guitar
Thomas Berglund – electric guitar
Bo Hallgren – keyboards
Ã…ke Eriksson – drums
Production
Mist Season
Track list
1. Far Away from Home (5:43)
2. Cartway across the Branches part I (4:26)
3. Daylite Sprite (4:48)
4.Cartway across the Branches part II (2:16)
5. Dance of the Miststress (4:37)
6. The Six Spruce (4:48)
7. Flowers of Asia (5:21)
8. Dawn (4:36)
9. Vexplorer (4:12)
10. Cartway across the Branches part III (5:10)
11. Woodpecker the Mocker (2:59)
12. Skyward Leafage (8:17)
13. Cartway across the Branches part IV (2:54)
14. Garden of Beruwela (5:52)
15. Tears of Woodland (9:52)
