Oddarrang – In Cinema
(Edition Records EDN1046. CD Review by Chris Parker)

Anyone given a brief description of this album – Finnish quintet playing music composed for independent films – might reasonably suppose that In Cinema would contain carefully wrought, multi-textured, haunting soundscapes, and they’d be right.

Composer/drummer/keyboard player Olavi Louhivuori (who was Tomasz Stańko’s drummer on the Polish trumpeter’s Dark Eyes), has written six of the album’s tracks (bassist/synth player Lasse Lindgren wrote the seventh), and they range from slow-building pieces centred on Lasse Sakara’s guitar riffs to inspiring, anthemic melodies utilising the band’s unconventional front line (trombonist Ilmari Pohjola, cellist Osmo Ikonen) to great effect.

‘Graceful’, ‘patient’ and ‘majestic’ are just some of the recent Twitter comments on this album, which is the band’s third (their first, Music Illustrated, won the Finnish equivalent of a Grammy), and they are all apposite: In Cinema is almost insidiously compulsive, and will appeal not only to admirers of Scandinavian ECM albums with pictures of frozen lakes on their covers, but also to fans of bands such as Sigur Rós or even Scottish duo Boards of Canada.