BURNING HEARTS - Extinctions

They say the best pop songs always carry a melancholy theme, forming a kind of collective therapy. "Extinctions" certainly doesn't hold back in this regard, gathering up a series of misfortunes that befell the two members of the band, Jessika Rapo (singer of Le Futur Pompiste) and Henry Ojala (former drummer of Cats on Fire), and transfiguring them through melody.

After starting to play together again during 2011, the pair retreated to Ostrobothnia, a stretch of Finnish coastline that serves as their favourite source of inspiration.

Most listeners will no doubt recognise the pop-wave matrix, which looks to Cure and Echo And The Bunnymen through the lens of their Swedish cousins Mary Onettes, in tracks like "Modern Times", "Trade Winds" and "Into The Wilderness", set alongside compositions closer to indie-pop, such as "The Beast".

Beyond the sound and the instruments and how they're used (a fairly "dry" guitar, a synthetic haze, a boxy, rigid rhythm section complete with "artificial" drum skins), the real strength of "Extinctions" lies not only in the melodies but also in some intriguing detours, such as the Julee Cruise-style ballad of the closing "Deep Waters" and the synthetic psychedelia of "Love And Dissonance" (vaguely Beach House); and then there's the unsettling murder ballad disguised as the majestic pop surge of "On The Last Day Of The Decade".

"Extinctions" has, in short, all the ingredients of a great pop album, but, like the blessing and curse of other Scandinavian bands, it lacks any real drive to break out of the sonic pen it has chosen to graze in. So even where the songwriting excels, everything ends up sounding muted, impersonal, much like Jessika Rapo's icy - and spot-on, make no mistake - voice.

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13/02/2012