Meritie
I’m no stranger to loose-limbed freak folk, where songs are more nuclei around which sounds coalesce than any sort of tightly knotted skeins of rhythm, melody and lyric, and perhaps it’s a consequence of spending much of the last week plundering the grand riches of the internet’s many fine MP3 blogs, but Islaja’s Meritie totally disorients me in a way I find very hard to understand or describe. Merja Kokkonen sings her Finnish lyrics in a sweetly meandering voice, engaging with the rest of the music (guitars, piano, various other noisemaking bits) in the way that a bird rides the gusts on a windy day. There’s nothing overtly challenging going on save for the songs’ very free structure, but that lack of structure means these are not songs so much as neatly arranged piles of musical ideas, and Kokkonen’s near-total refusal to engage with typical notions of songcraft lend her songs a hallucinatory, subversive power that makes me giddy and confused in equal measure. I’m not sure it’s beautiful, but it’s certainly sublime.