Go forth

1) Loituma - Ievan Polkka

I first heard this tune playing over a dreamily bizarre video of a full-grown moose living as a house-pet in a family’s home – literally a moose loose aboot the hoose. It had its own mattress to lie on as it watched television, and at one point appears to carefully straighten a picture hanging on the wall. What made the footage a little sinister was that there were clearly moose antlers on the wall of one of the rooms. It brought to mind thoughts of ancient pagan rituals, where the unknowing victim is treated to a life of luxury before being sacrificed to the gods of fertility or clotheshangers or whatever.

But quite aside from that, it was the music that caught my attention. It reminds me a little of Sigur Ros, darlings of BBC nature film trailers and one of the few things to come out of Iceland apart from Bjork and garishly coloured packets of cheap frozen prawns. If you were just to take the vocals from a clutch of Sigur Ros tunes, layer them on top of each other and speed the whole lot up tenfold you might come out the other end with something like this song.

The band is from Finland and they’re called Loituma. To non-Finnish ears it sounds like a barbershop quartet who’ve experienced a life-altering religious experience that caused them to start speaking in tongues, but to a native this is a touching 1930s folk song. Be warned, this is also a major earworm that may well sneak into your head and never escape.

2) Bert and Ernie play a nice little song.

Who was it who said that comedy occurs when the familiar is juxtaposed with the unexpected? Oh yeah, it was me, just now. Watch.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Humour, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.