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Album Review
by SashaS
21-2-2005
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| The Karelia: re-'Divorce at High Noon' |
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The Karelia: 'Divorce At High Noon'
(Roadrunner)
The Karelia: a curious-but-worthy look-back
Last week’s news that Franz Ferdinand won two NME Awards meant that the Scottish outfit became the first artist to win at all three major British music awards in a year. They won the Mercury Music Prize and triumphed at previous week’s Brits. The line-up, led by Alex Kapranos, must have been on the verge of hilarity while seeing many a bottle bottom.
Well, only some seven/eight years ago, the very same Alex, then surnamed Huntley, was trying his luck with an outfit called The Karelia. Their only album ‘Divorce At High Noon’ was criminally ignored and the disc sold… erm, hundreds of copies. Cousins, friends and school mates even forgot about such oddity in their collection until this rarity started changing hands at several hundred quid a pop at your friendly Website. Well, you can stop saving as this artefact is available again.
‘Divorce At High Noon’ are recordings of a band in search of a sound, own expression and vocabulary, not afraid to experiment, mixing a lot styles for an eclectic selection… The album was produced by Bid [from the seminal Brit-New Wavers The Monochrome Set who, accidentally, were also responsible for the formation of Bananarama, the most successful girl-group until Spice Girls] and it has a bit of that feel but then much more, such as fusionistic drift…
This is somewhat an untamed piece of work, sometime a tad all over the place [testing gratuitously?], throwing in many a thing and sounding oblique per se at times. But that youthful exuberance for unrepressed creativity and feeling free to “do what they wanna do” and wherever it takes their fancy - is the record's main charm.
Opening with the title track, a vaudeville-like song that could owe a debt to David Bowie during his Berlin period with some echoes of Josef K… ‘Love‘s A Cliché’ is more jazzy with Alex sounding like a singer on a cruise-ship until song segues into this Euro-ethnicity… It gets even more eccentric on ‘Say Try’, going even deeper into jazz territory… And yet, they could kick mighty and boisterous rockism as intro to ‘Garavurghty Butes’ effortlessly demonstrates; the tune then evolves into this improv-to-avantgarde-coollness of 10-plus minutes!
The album sounds very courageous at this musically stifled time that gets more benign by day and back in 1997 - it was equally outta sync. From a Weimer Republic-like cabaret singer to being a French chansonnier [check ‘Tension’ or one of bonus tracks, the French version of the titular cut], Alex handles it all with aplomb, lounge flare of Sir Noel Coward, sense of humour [and sonic chaos] of Bonzo Doo Dah Dog Band and lyrical astuteness of the late Cockney warbler Ian Dury.
It could easily be an anti-rocking Scottish-answer to ‘New Boots and Pants’ - twenty years on. This is the biggest compliment we can give this quartet with unusual line-up of guitar-bass-trumpet-drums. And, it appears that an old collection such as this one that disregards pop/rock conventions, is more up-to-date than Britney’s latest marriage!
The band’s strange name is a brand of Greek ciggies smoked by drummer Tassos Bombos at the time; it is also a region of northern Finland and Russia. It also sounds - magical, like Arcadia.
9/10
SashaS
11-1-2005
The Karelia’s ‘Divorce At High Noon’ album is [re]released 21 February 2005 by Roadrunner
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