Husky Rescue – Ghost is not real
February 8th, 2007 by rui
Husky Rescue’s country-laced ice cold pop formula is a winner. Having charmed the 2005 Castle Stage crowd with a knockout combination of great songs and gorgeous good looks, Finns Marko Nyberg, Reeta-Leena Korhola, Miika Colliander, Ville Riippa, Anssi Sopanen – aka Husky Rescue – now offer up their latest long player, the cool melancholic Ghost Is Not Real.
The straighter pop moments on Ghost Is Not Real are good, but when Husky Rescue get experimental and start messing about with arrangements and machines, there are flashes of something even greater.
This is evident straight away on Ghost Is Not Real’s opener, ‘My Home Ghost’ – a showstopper from whispered intro to towering crescendo. The middle section’s trilogy of tracks – ‘Blueberry Tree’ Parts I, II and III – consists of three variations on a theme. First a simple, gentle song, then multilayered arrangement, then a building, looping, accelerating, instrumental deconstruction/reconstruction – all around the same basic chord progression and melody. Each individual piece works on its own, but taken together they’re huge. ‘Nightless Night’ (video below) sees the band morph into Blondie for the first few minutes, before wigging out on a lovely, frosty instrumental break for what seems like forever, finally crashing back with the vocal and fading out on a cheeky bit electro. Nice and adventurous.
There are some featherweight pop moments – the album’s closer is a catchy country pop song called ‘Caravan’ with radioplay written all over it, and ‘Diamonds in the Sky’ would struggle to hold down a sheet of a A4 on a breezy day. There is a leftfield marmite moment too – ‘Silent Woods’ is a strange electro thing, very 80s sounding and odd.
A quirky album – ethereal and spooky but never threatening -where some of the poppier moments might leave you cold, but the weirder and wilder extremes have the potential to chill in every sense. Can’t wait for the next album, but in the meantime a few moments from Ghost Is Not Real are destined for repeat plays.
Ghost Is Not Real by Husky Rescue is out now on Catskills.
Nightless Night Video
