Kemialliset Ystavat - Ullakkopalo

Mental buggers alert. After the plod & whine of the last CD, this new effort from Finland's finest free-folk madheads is a true blast of fresh Scandinavian air. How they so successfullymerge psych/acid-folk, gibbering electronics, field recordings, tape loops & mind-bending swathes of sound collage into such a listenable stew i'll never imagine. This new album is one of the oddest things we've heard in the last few weeks I reckon, but totally fun & quite mesmerising. To throw this many ingredients into the pan & not produce a load of disorientating aural slop is a marvel to behold. The mélange can verge on the almost spiritual & wildly tropical one minute but can then turn on-a-dime into a monged-out cartoonish pool of berserk, belching psychedelia & kaleidoscopic blues. You really have no idea where this journey is going to finish up next. There's a remarkable array of ideas pinning this delirious odyssey together. The random segues actually sound totally cohesive, one beautifully realised passage stumbles drunkenly into another. There's an occasional dip into eerie territories but on the whole this is a spellbinding, upbeat & hyper-exotic trip that could only be further enhanced by a mushroom brew & a jazz fag (but I don't endorse drugs kids so I didn't say that....) There's comparisons to Black Dice but they sound like idiotic infants compared to this smart collective.