Kauniinhauta

Kauniinhauta is a bit iffy in the context of grammar in Finnish, but it roughly translates to "the grave of the beutiful one", or perhaps to "the tomb of beauty". The latter tastes more like the album and its atmosphere, so that shall be our official translation for the duration of this review.

Mustan Kuun Lapset used to be one of those bands that probably have some F-117 Nighthawk in their ancestry: they managed to avoid most of the metal search radars during their existence, and their final funeral was bigger news than anything they had done before. Well-liked among the people who knew of them, and certainly disliked by very few, they remained relatively unknown despite their discography with four full-lengths and a an EP. It's kind of odd they never made it on any mentionable scale, because there's definitely very little wrong with this album. Perhaps the target audience is simply too small; real sadness is harder to sell than Ville Valo asking a chick to slash her wrists for him.

Kauniinhauta could be classified as dark/black metal, but that would not do justice to it. The music here is melancholic and sometimes slowish, but it has a lot of beautiful parts in it, and the basic feeling is not very gloomy; on the contrary, there's a hopeful undercurrent in every song, and the poetic nature of the lyrics and the songs is about the nature preparing for the cold winter and life finding new possibilities among decay. These songs are more about visits to the gravesites of lost loved ones, death as a part of the life's great cycle, and sadness making a nest on a windy shore, than about death, Satan and blasphemy. The music of late-career Mustan Kuun Lapset is poetic, and well-made in that.

The music has a nice, warm character, despite the dark/black stamp mentioned above. While the riffing and vocals could well suit a medium-heavy black metal band in purely objective numerical terms, the engineer's approach would lead the reader to the wrong conclusion. What can be found here has a home-made atmosphere. That makes no sense, of course, but what they lack in aggression and blasphemy, they make up in a sorrowful friendly feeling. The taste of the last bottle of a dying grandmother's home-made apple juice is there. The pretty much perfectly fitting production does have some of the abrasive dryness of typical black metal, but the sound is closer to the smell of a plywood box that has kept the letters from a deceased lover on the shelf in the basement, rather than the dirty feel of a different plywood box with a six weeks old cadaver of a decapitated priest in it.

The band was assisted by a few guests while making the album. The most important ones add to the home-grown feel of Kauniinhauta. The viola has a beautiful tone to it, and it's not the kind of cardboard box too often heard on metal albums wishing to have something different and refined on them. No, this one sings its rather simple tunes in an almost cello-like, almost earthly, tone, and while the player does not do anything especially reeking of work by a virtuoso, it's obvious that he did not just take a few lessons on the instrument in late 80s. What's more important to the atmosphere, however, is the female guest vocalist, Kati Kajander, and her fragile "girl next door" performance on two of the songs. Her voice is not a classically trained Tarja Turunen -wannabe, nor anything like that foghorn in Cradle of Filth, but more like an everyday, home-grown female voice reciting poetry in the form of a song. "Talviyön tanssiinkutsu" has her singing about the nature dying before the coming winter, and she manages to turn the rather sensitive song into something intimate, honest and beautiful. A more schooled voice would surely ruin the emotion.

Kauniinhauta utilizes many of the established tricks of the sub-genre it inhabits, especially the contrast between the clean acoustic parts and the faster, more metallic sections. The production and its warm tones are perfect for this music, not raw in any sense, but more like a photorealistic snapshot of something sad: no plishing, no hiding, just the music. The synths add a layer of strength to a couple of well-chosen spots, but do not distract the attention.

The topmost feeling remaining after the album finishes is home-made sadness, warmth and humble hope. The melancholic beauty later found its most perfect incarnation in the form of a single, Morfiinisiivet, the saddest piece of work ever written by a metal band, but that happened just before the demise of Mustan Kuun Lapset. Taking withering flowers to their grave on some freezing winter morning would be a fitting recognition of the value of their work; this is poetry, not just metal.