Since winter clearly refuses to subside it might be a good idea to see if some allegorical alternatives for warmth are to be found from the world of music. First, the “Direct Personal Involvement”-section:

Sinisthra is currently writing new material and listening to a skeleton recording of a tune we’ve been dabbling with fills me with an undeniable sensation of warmth and general feelgoodness. I’m seriously itching to fit it with some lyrical content once the actual melody lines for vocals surface. This might take some time yet since it’s practically impossible to make rehearsals happen on as regular a basis as I’d like them to happen. So there’s some sourness to the warmth derived from this.

L.A.M.F. had a meeting yesterday where we agreed to try and write an albums’ worth of music, and if decent enough songs start appearing, see if it would be possible to release an album. This naturally warms me up a bit, but since I have no creative input in that band to speak of, it doesn’t exactly set my soul on fire. Plus, in case we actually manage to come up with an album, there’s the additional nuisance of trying to find someone to release it too. I’m not anxiously looking forward to adding another unreleased and unfinished album to my list of recorded works, alongside the perpetual-and-daily-hurting-thorn-on-my-side Sinisthra album that was started on July 2008, and the ridiculously prolonged The Puritan album, for which I recorded my drum parts on November 2006. So there’s only a limited amount of warmth derived from this too.

Moving on to “Music Not Including Personal Involvement, Making It Potentially Enjoyable In A Genuine Way”-section:

The “Template For A Generation”-album by Darwin’s Radio has been slowly growing on me, until today it suddenly bloomed, as the song in the middle, “Breathe It In”, took off, and at the same time also sunk in. The main thing that’s been keeping me from hailing them as brilliant has been my mild dislike for the vocals that are a bit on the weakish side. The singer used to be in a Rush tribute band and I’ve never been a fan of that school of singing. Today I read from their web page that this singer has now upped and left but the band has decided to carry on and find a new guitarist/singer. To me, this is good news and I’m looking forward to hearing what they come up with in the future. Listening to this album makes me feel indisputably warm inside, shame about the YouTube link below cutting off before the song reaches its’ climax.


The new Tuvalu album has been the best thing lately, though. I preordered it as soon as I found out they were releasing new music, and got a free mp3 download with it. This has been blasting away on my car sound system for two weeks now, causing delicate situations in the traffic as I sometimes can’t help tapping my foot to the grooviest parts of their music. The album is absolutely brilliant, to put it mildly. Tuvalu is in my opinion the most significant band singing in Finnish for ages, only CMX has had an impact similarly strong on me. This thing definitely warms me in a most definite way in the midst of bleakest winter.