I hardly know the Finnish indie-rock scene but I’m pretty sure Echo Is Your Love is about the best band in Finland. This Helsinki-based noisy-rock quintet recently released an excellent album entitled Paper Cut Eye. Intertwined guitar lines, fierce yet catchy choruses, bass and guitar chatting while the other guitar is on a noisy trip are song recipes mostly used in Paper Cut Eye that definitely ring a bell. Influenced by Sonic Youth (think Sister or Goo) and early Blonde Redhead, their lively-paced noisy-rock is driven by a twisted female voice. The only song in which there are what I consider as Finnish words, ‘Tuua’, is plainly enjoyable and sincerely if I didn’t know the band’s origin, I would have taken these few words for Japanese, the song being close to what Blonde Redhead was playing circa La Mia Vita Violentà or Fake Can Be Just As Good.

Instrumental noisy-ish moments are adequate interludes. While most of the bands want their title song to be their best one, the Finnish band’s title track is a 2-minutes instrumental piano drift whose sad tone is backed-up by vinyl cracking… All the things I’ve described added to a pervasive messy aspect and some disjointed riffs à la Polvo make Paper Cut Eye a nice listen. The SY influence might be brought into relief too much in the otherwise extremely addictive ‘Pleasure unknown’ (‘I think of Thurston and I think of Kim’ being the first line of the chorus) – my favourite song here. Each time I wrote the album’s title, I had to delete the word ‘exit’ and replace it by ‘eye’… but all the songs are great so if detractors add that the voice is out of tune, let’s not pay attention because they will probably be the same who think that Kathleen Hannah or Sleater-Kinney are out of tune. Just listen to ‘Lightning Conductor’ schizophrenic dimension and to its chorus vocal lines that drive insane instead.

All things considered, Echo Is Your Love’s music really reminds me of the excellent but unfortunately intermittent German band Monochrome even if here male vocals are limited to discreet back-voices. And even if noisy-rock is not really your cup of tea I recommend that you check Echo Is Your Love because they have clever song titles that can scare you: ‘Adult situation, no kisses’, ‘We don’t speak numbers’ and my favourite ‘I don’t go to my friends’ parties ‘cos everyone looks so old’.

-SEB ‘swamp soccer’ WOOd.

/may 1st 2005/