DROWSY – Snow on moss on stone

(CD, Fat Cat)

Fat Cat’s release schedule as turned sharply towards acoustic guitars in the wake of Vashti Bunyan’s praised comeback album and the (critical) acclaim following in its wake. See the new album by Tom Brosseau as well. No, I am not insinuating a business decision but nothing less than the results of a new love for a musical genre. Nevertheless, with Sub Pop celebrating a return towards the headlights of music journalistic focus by a similar turn, I sense a hype or trend coming on, and fear for my favorite labels and bands just the same. Because music and musicians can easily bend underneath the pressure and digestion of the musical machine. Especially music as fragile and delicate as this one here, made with acoustic guitar, voice and imagination. Moreover, the number of singer / songwriters from Scandinavia roaming the world and pleasing audiences all around with their tales of woe and lost love, their observations of mankind and its behaviour both big and small and the gently strummed or picked strings insinuating songs mostly written by themselves in motel rooms late at night, is slowly growing beyond feasability.

What sets Mauri Heikkinen aka Drowsy apart from the whole drift is, among others, a sense for melodies so rich and dynamic as if they came directly from the psychedelic years, for instance when he mixes a folkloristic big band drumbeat and harmonica with a sort of big arrangement to produce a stupefyingly simple yet enriching song about the old times, the hopes that lay in the dreams that people had and the turmoil that blows all of them to pieces. And that song is one part lo-fi and two parts marching band (“Good Old Odd Gold”). Not bad for an instrumental song, isn’t it. Plus Heikkinen seems ro have a sense of humour, which is rarely ever seen in this modern kind of folk music, where everyone is walking around depressed and earnest as if still mourning Nick Drake’s early death. There is some of that as well on “Snow on moss on stone”, but als check out “Treehouse” and the funny vocal mutations Drowsy uses on this track.

But these songs are amongst the exceptions on this album. Interestingly, Heikkinen prefers to stay at the softer yet no less deep reaching side, whenever there are vocals involved, setting chords and notes with minute detail to the rhythm and the notes that the words hit, sometimes breathing out syllable after syllable with importance and meaning. More like the snow falling on the moss and the stones than lying there peacefully. Melodies, where other, less secure artists would have chosen grandeur and big arrangements to ensure their place within the top40 of the alternative charts, Heikkinen prefers the small and fragile step, that grows into epic proportions by listening closely. “bed of pyre & wood” could easily be a century old funeral song or traditional in the vain of “oh bury me not (on the lone prairie)”, but within its arrangement of single plucked strings and winds blowing in the background, the song, like a lonely prayer in the wilderness, becomes bigger than it would have been otherwise. And, wow, how a single instance of strumming can resolve peace and harmony and relief at the end of a song. There is another song on “Snow on Moss on Stone” which is a sort of funeral oratory but of a completely different kind: “Off you go all authors” has a big harmonica monotonously changing between two notes and Heikkinen singing his heart out.

Unfortunately, I am unable to really get a grip on what Drowsy is singing about, but I am catching a drift of old folk tales being worked into song, eternal conflicts of generations, fights among villages and nations and the strange things that happen if the real world of the human cities and the magic world of the scnadinavian woods rub their elbows. Is it possible that Drowsy is in posession of a knowledge or wisdom much bigger or more important than the rest of us? I wish he would share it. Maybe he does, only we are unable to decipher it.