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Poets of the Fall

Every so often I feel the urge to listen to some ‘new’ music.

One of the drawbacks of growing older – at least where listening to ‘popular’ music is concerned – is that it is all too easy to lose touch with recent trends, persisting instead with that which one already knows. The reasons for this are pretty obvious. Much new music is aimed at the young – both in terms of content and in the way it is marketed. This should come as no surprise of course, since the young comprise the main market for it, but the result can be that the rest of us – and our money – are left out in the cold.

We make up for it in many cases by buying new versions (or just new copies) of the music that we listened to in our own youth. Many of us believe in any case that the music scene has steadily gone downhill since whenever that was, and that what remains is but a pale shadow of those glory years. Much recent music seems artificial – driven by the wants of TV ‘talent’ shows – and the rest has steadily become more and more self-referential (pop indeed eating itself) as the same pool of material is repeatedly re-mined, re-sampled and re-used in ever more dilute proportions. It is worryingly difficult to distinguish much sign of the creativity and imagination that pervaded the music of my youth – though it is, of course, pretty difficult to see anything at all through these rose-tinted shades!

I am – naturally – making far too much of this. There is plenty of interesting music around, but with the decline of the once accepted methods of production and dissemination – record companies, record stores, radio playlists and so forth – and the rise of the InterWebNet as a tool for publishing, acquisition and the discovery of music, it is surely much less likely that any gems out there would these days be discovered by chance.

I used to listen to music on the radio a great deal. I no longer do so, as I find most of the UK music stations pretty intolerable. I fear I have reached the age when I prefer to listen to the spoken word – or at least I prefer to listen to the BBC’s radio 4 – which is much the same thing. Oddly I find music radio in Canada to be considerably more agreeable. There seems to be less ‘ghettoisation’ of music into apparently irreconcilably disconnected genres.

Still – as I said at the very top – I felt the need to discover something with which I was not yet familiar. I knew the broad type of music that I hoped to find and – armed with a couple of suitable examples from my existing catalog – I ventured into the digital world. Now – this is something that the InterWebNet is good at, though one has (quite rightly) to work pretty hard to get the desired results. What did we do in the days before we could ask the oracle questions such as “What else is a bit like this, that I might like”?

“Cut the crap”, you say “and just tell us what you found!” Now, now – don’t be impatient…

OK – ladies and gentlemen – I give to you – the ‘Poets of the Fall’.

This Finnish band (yes, really!) – who are pretty much unknown in the UK and Canada as far as I can tell – create a splendidly melodic blend of old and new. They seem to be big in Germany and India (!) where they tour extensively, but they don’t appear as yet to have played in the UK and they have certainly not made it to Canada.

I like them. They may not be your bag, but why not give them a listen? Here are some clips:

‘Late Goodbye’

‘Sleep

‘Heal my Wounds’

Enjoy!

 

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2 comments

  1. KACG’s avatar

    I like it. I am curious as to what you put in your search to find them – a little bit of what and a little bit of who exactly? I was also curious about John Mirror and found this – there is a lot of talk about Max Payne which the Interwebnet shows to be a movie and game (not sure which way ’round) So, a sound you like with a connection to all that is new – games from movies or movies from games.

    Check this out:
    http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858514607/

  2. admin’s avatar

    The connection may seem remote, but I started with ‘Train’. I have always liked the Train sound and Pat Monahan’s voice, but there is a big step down from ‘Drops of Jupiter’ – which I love – to anything else they wrote.

    The Poets are a long way from Train, but have some of the same characteristics.

    I take the ‘john’ mirror reference literally – the mirror in a toilet. Thanks for the ‘Songmeanings’ link by the way. I use the site quite a bit and I am always amazed by the somewhat fanciful interpretations enthusiasts ascribe to lyrics. This is – of course – exactly what lyrics – and poems – are supposed to do, but it is a mistake in many cases to assume that the meanings inferred represent authorial intention. The writer pulls phrases from his imagination which may indeed be loaded with meanings that he himself does not see, but they trigger in the listener his or her own associations.

    In the case of the Poets – of course – they are not writing/singing in their first language – which gives lyrics an extra twist. I have to admit that – for me – the sound and harmonic content of the music always comes first, followed closely by the expressiveness of the voice – and a good band and singer can probably make the telephone directory (remember those!) sound profound….

    Thanks for the comment.

    Andy

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