asiatonta oleskelua

Asiatonta oleskelua is the new Litku Klemetti album (the title means 'Unauthorised stay') and I find it intriguing, though I have to say, nowhere near as immediately appealing as the others I've heard. 

Once again, the biggest problem is of course I don't understand Finnish. I can see from the translate camera function that the lyrics are reflective/mournful/possibly even obtuse but that might be how automatic translation always affects things like song lyrics. 

Not having to worry too much about the words means I concentrate more on the music. Somewhat regretfully I note that there are a lot of flourishes herein that seem gimmicky - like someone had a shopping list of what belongs in a 70s power ballad - and quite a few of these songs fit that bill, notably the first track 'En Elä', (which by the way google translate says means 'I don't live') which even ends somewhat inexplicably with some sergeant pepperish horns at the end - go figure. 

But having said the above I have had this thing in my head a lot since I last listened to it on the weekend, and bits keep popping up. You will note from my supermodel Perry above I actually bought the CD, that was entirely on accident, I didn't know what I was doing. I have a CD player upstairs but not downstairs at the moment (tbh it would be super easy to patch it in to my 'system' but I'm going to be pulling all that apart and putting it back together in a few weeks when I get my shelves put in, so, blah blah wgaf) so I haven't listened to it since I played it in my mother's car which I borrowed because mine's being repaired because it has a problem with its clutch and wah wah wah. 

So point is I think I will come around, I was just a bit challenged by the conventional sound and style of this album, but the tunes are really good and it is just paradoxically harder to get into because, you know, I don't understand Finnish. I mean I understand around three words per song.  

litku klemetti

This is the Litku Klemetti album coming out next month. It's called Asiatonta oleskelua which means 'Unauthorised stay'

I must have written about Litku Klemetti here at some point but I find that my 2022 interest in contemporary indie Finnish pop music has kind of grown me a new portion of brain (possibly it is a tumour) where the meagre information I have been able to glean about various artists and releases have been piling up unprocessed like detritus on the forest floor except that does kind of get processed, by microorganisms. Well, Litku Klemetti has/have become something of a key interest in the last few months and I am going to try and explain why.

Firstly, the has/have - I noticed while filing away a couple of Litku Klemetti albums (between King Snake Roost and Kolla Kestäa) that I was missing one. I found it under L. So clearly I have had different ideas at different times. Apparently Sanna Klemetti adopted the nickname Litku (which means 'slop' or something like that) at some point and started a band called Litku Klemetti and Tuntematon Numero, and made a couple of albums with that name, then became just Litku Klemetti a few albums ago. So of course it would be entirely legit to file the records under L or K really. I have presently settled on K. I mean I have Alice Cooper (the band) and Alice Cooper (the man) albums both filed under C. What I will do if I ever get any Litku Klemetti and Tuntematon Numero albums? Great question, thanks, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Those albums are presently extremely hard to get so I don't have that problem right now. I mean my Neil Young and Crazy Horse albums are filed under Y not N, so maybe nothing will change. 

I don't know why those earlier albums are hard to find except perhaps that Litku Klemetti has kind of 'taken off' but also it might have something to do with the fact that she/they seem to have changed labels for the new album (depicted above) and maybe that's the reason why the earlier records are listed on the Luova records website but most of them are not presently available. 

So I have three Litku Klemetti albums: Taika Tapahtuu ('Magic Happens'), from 2018; Ding Ding Dong (going to assume that title is more or less self-explanatory though who really knows), from 2019 and Kukkia Muovipussissa ('Flowers in a Plastic Bag') from 2021. Wikipedia tells me (there is, amazingly, an English language Litku Klemetti wikipedia page) that Sanna Klemetti grew up in the far west of Finland (in Kuhmo, which must be a tiny town because the whole province of that name has less than 8000 people in it) listening to prog rock albums she borrowed from the library. I have no idea what her records prior to Taika Tapahtuu sound like (will probably find out eventually, they're all on spotify) but that record does have a distinct prog feeling to it, in a Keith Emerson way. But Ding Ding Dong is much more pop and Kukkia Muovipussissa is very eurodisco or perhaps just discodisco in style. They are all really good. 

I was amazed to see when looking through pictures from my Finnish trip in late 2019 that I came across a cassette of Ding Ding Dong in that branch of Levykauppa Äx in Oulu near the railway station and was sufficiently struck by its aesthetic to photograph it (but not to buy it). 

Instead what I did buy was the first Hello People album and made this humorous photograph with it in my hotel bed. 

Anyway, back to LK. The next step is to figure out what the songs are about. This is dangerous as I might decide I don't want to like them anymore because they're about terrible things. Intriguing. 

This leads to another thing that really interests me.  What's the politics in Finland (population five and a half million) of making records only in Finnish? I mean, I come from a sparsely populated country, but 5.5 million is about half a million more people than live in the city I live in, and substantially less (by a million) than the amount of people in this state. I'm not saying that's per se important I'm just intrigued about the way that writing/singing/performing in your own language must on the one hand limit your audience in world terms while possibly also boosting your audience in the sense that, firstly, it's surely nice to hear things expressed in your own language, and secondly, along the lines of that advertising banner that used to (and may still) be on the side of that building at the western end of the Eastern Freeway: 'Buy Australian - if we don't, who will?'. I have previously mentioned in writing about my other major Finnish preoccupation Pintandwefall that they sing in English, very well, but do not appear to have tried to capitalise on this at all - i.e. all their records are released only in Finland and they have played only a handful of shows outside Finland, and none in English-speaking territories as far as I know. 

So I don't get it but my foot really hurts so I'm going to stop writing now.