Kauan - Aava Tuulen Maa

Title: Aava Tuulen Maa
Artist: Kauan
Genre: Ambient, Post Rock
Release Date: 18th November 2009
Label: Firebox Records



Album Review

KAUAN, Russian band with a Finnish name that can be translated as “a long time” or “for long”, was founded in 2005 and already recorded three full-length albums, including new work ‘Aava Tuulen Maa’. Initially started as a folk doom metal project combining these styles with some ambience, the formation has changed its music a lot and the material presented on the new CD simply can’t be called “metal”. Here we deal with five rather long compositions which have their merits and demerits. First of all, as I already said the music became softer and more exquisite reflecting the band’s intentions to create a peculiar atmosphere of light melancholy, to convey the beauty of different landscapes.

The first two tracks are nice and interesting, producing a strong impression on a listener when in one’s head there appear gentle images of forests or fields, foster illusions of drizzling rain, light wind, sunshine. Ambient tunes are supplemented with calm guitars, delicate piano and violin passages and in the other tracks the clean quiet male voice singing in Finnish is added to this mixture. So it seems that everything is just great but after the third track ‘Föhn’ is getting really hard to concentrate on the music because that melancholy now turns into some despondency. The monotonous melody starts to irritate and all the fantasies are fading making you come back to the reality.

Well, ‘Aava Tuulen Maa’ is an ambiguous work on one hand really qualitative and aesthetic, on the other hand rather boring towards the end. But nevertheless KAUAN’s new album may interest fans of TENHI and some other bands of the kind.


Tracklist

01. Ommeltu Polku
02. Valveuni
03. Föhn
04. Sokea Sisar
05. Neulana Hetkessä


Line-up

Anton Belov – Vocals, Guitars, Keys, Programming
Lubov Mushnikove – Violin


Website

http://www.myspace.com/kauanmusic


Cover Picture




Rating

Music: 6
Sound: 7
Extras: -
Total: 6.5 / 10


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