Album Review: UTU – Love Collection: By the Ashes That Used to Be the Everlasting Fire
The new album by UTU (it means "foggy weather above the sea" in Finnish, if you're curious) is devoted to one subject – love. But the way the record deals with it might surprise you.
UTU
All the songs in this album are somehow related to the subject: LOVE. But there are no actual love songs in it. It is more about the need for love or the strange, even violent aspects of it. An album about the things that might look like love.
The collection opens with Reality Beats All Dreams – a composition that is built around an unsettling string texture, cold-blooded drum machine and a spoken word part culminating with the words I hope that I’ll stop wishing you were dead. Yes, love can be like that too. Or, rather, love can become that. We are just in the beginning – we are yet to learn what else it may become.
Or, in other words, The Worst Is Yet to Come, which is the title of the next song that starts with a similar unsettling textural spider web of a sound and then it expands into a galaxy of distorted timbres. Vocalist Petra Poutanen's silky and vulnerable voice floats in the dark space of this galaxy that keeps shifting and changing forms.
The next form it takes is as dark as it gets. It Must Have Been Love at First Hit with its acidic bubbly synth that resembles a breathing and shaking slimy creature is most likely about physical violence between lovers.
In The Snow I Look Dead But I Just Pretend paints a freezy soundscape likely to send shivers down your spine with pizzicato strings, intimate piano and a wall of enigmatic noises.
The production on All the Love is really curious. If the song was mixed differently, it would make a groovy hip-hop beat or a dark R&B one, akin to the arrangements on The Weeknd's early mixtapes. And the passions that inspired the lyrics belong to the same dark world. The song's heroine proclaims the things done "with eyes closed are things she does with her heart and soul open". This could be a careless love ode, but the passionate music tells us that the steps she takes might lead to all kinds of dark love we encounter on this album.
Happy to Be Sad adds Postpunk / New Wave colours to the palette, creating a song that could serve as a soundtrack to a ritual or procession, and even the lyrics allude to that: "All funerals start with the word fun”.
Waterfall with its simplistic yet highly emotional string arpeggios brings to mind the works of French academic minimalist composers, while the lyrics speak of the power of elements: "A waterfall I’ve become, I can swallow whole river."
The Woman of My Dreams is built around a repeating pattern played on huge distorted kick drums shaking the earth like the stomping of elephants in must. The marriage of this minimalistic production with highly emotional vocals make this piece of art pop close in its atmosphere to the famous collaborations between Björk and Timbaland.
Money Into Love starts with disarmingly bitter lyrics: "Let’s pretend that we are lovers, change money into love." The vocal melody flows like a river, contrasting against a wall of marching drums and subdued strings and piano.
The album ends with the achingly beautiful ballad Oh, Sorrow. The reverberated backing vocals create an ethereal bed of sound, while piano chords provide an intimate setting. The album finishes on a hopeful note: "I will grow free to feel something else."
The last song's luminous aftertaste overshadows all the pain, darkness, bitterness and shattered dreams of the previous nine compositions. Love can be cruel, love can burn like fire, but in the end love is healing. And so is this album. It takes you by the hand and leads you through hell to show you the bright and clear sky in the end. And I am more than willing to go through all of this again and again to experience the record's purifying effect. I guess that's how real art works.
Or, in other words, The Worst Is Yet to Come, which is the title of the next song that starts with a similar unsettling textural spider web of a sound and then it expands into a galaxy of distorted timbres. Vocalist Petra Poutanen's silky and vulnerable voice floats in the dark space of this galaxy that keeps shifting and changing forms.
The next form it takes is as dark as it gets. It Must Have Been Love at First Hit with its acidic bubbly synth that resembles a breathing and shaking slimy creature is most likely about physical violence between lovers.
In The Snow I Look Dead But I Just Pretend paints a freezy soundscape likely to send shivers down your spine with pizzicato strings, intimate piano and a wall of enigmatic noises.
The production on All the Love is really curious. If the song was mixed differently, it would make a groovy hip-hop beat or a dark R&B one, akin to the arrangements on The Weeknd's early mixtapes. And the passions that inspired the lyrics belong to the same dark world. The song's heroine proclaims the things done "with eyes closed are things she does with her heart and soul open". This could be a careless love ode, but the passionate music tells us that the steps she takes might lead to all kinds of dark love we encounter on this album.
Happy to Be Sad adds Postpunk / New Wave colours to the palette, creating a song that could serve as a soundtrack to a ritual or procession, and even the lyrics allude to that: "All funerals start with the word fun”.
Waterfall with its simplistic yet highly emotional string arpeggios brings to mind the works of French academic minimalist composers, while the lyrics speak of the power of elements: "A waterfall I’ve become, I can swallow whole river."
The Woman of My Dreams is built around a repeating pattern played on huge distorted kick drums shaking the earth like the stomping of elephants in must. The marriage of this minimalistic production with highly emotional vocals make this piece of art pop close in its atmosphere to the famous collaborations between Björk and Timbaland.
Money Into Love starts with disarmingly bitter lyrics: "Let’s pretend that we are lovers, change money into love." The vocal melody flows like a river, contrasting against a wall of marching drums and subdued strings and piano.
The album ends with the achingly beautiful ballad Oh, Sorrow. The reverberated backing vocals create an ethereal bed of sound, while piano chords provide an intimate setting. The album finishes on a hopeful note: "I will grow free to feel something else."
The last song's luminous aftertaste overshadows all the pain, darkness, bitterness and shattered dreams of the previous nine compositions. Love can be cruel, love can burn like fire, but in the end love is healing. And so is this album. It takes you by the hand and leads you through hell to show you the bright and clear sky in the end. And I am more than willing to go through all of this again and again to experience the record's purifying effect. I guess that's how real art works.