Pitchfork

There was truly nice weather here in Chicago for about seven full days recently and that makes it easy to have a visceral reaction to the video for Lau Nau's "Painovoimaa, Valoa", in which the Finnish folksinger-- around the 1:28 mark-- touches a snowy tree branch without a glove on; my brain immediately jumped, "Don't touch that! Your hand will be cold and numb for like 20 minutes!"

During the song Lau Nau-- Laura Naukkarinen, a member of (surprise!) several Finnish collectives/bands including Fonal's Kiila-- traipses through a snowy forest unraveling colored yarn, a description that works equally well for music. This sort of shivering, oaken free folk music is a little like firing a shotgun-- um, okay, firing an extremely quiet shotgun in a non-violent manner-- at close range in that there's a lot of scatter and you don't need to aim much, but "Painovoimaa, Valoa" works because it's counterintuitive in very sly ways: gently corkscrewing violins, voices doubled and tripled at odd times, snow in the summer. (Directed by Sami Sänpäkkilä of the Fonal label, who are licensing the record from Locust to release it in Finland.)

[from Nukkuu; due in May 2008 from Locust]