The new album by the Finnish rock band Rubik, called Dada Bandits, opens with a song called “Goji Berries”. In ten seconds, it’s turned from an electronic pop dream into a screamyrageyshouty thrash moment and back to the first one as if nothing ever happened. This tells us two things:

1) That you can never know where Dada Bandits heads next

2) That the band has certainly grown between the debut and the second album

When we first met Rubik during their debut Bad Conscience Patrol, they were a bunch of Finnish lads with a fondness towards the melancholy British rock scene, with some heavy OK Computer-era Radiohead influence audible. The result was a damn good album featuring one of the best Finland-born songs made with “City & the Streets”. As Dada Bandits shows, Rubik’s started to find their own slot more. The grand, starry-eyed pop epics the band likes to sprinkle around are still here – the new album’s “Wasteland” is practically a spiritual successor to “City & the Streets” – but this time instead of spending the rest of the album in the murky waters of melancholy brooding, Rubik shows a near math-rocky side this time. Wildly changing song parts with slim resemblances towards eachother and mucking about with time signatures becomes a sound more and more familiar as the album progresses forwards; it never becomes a main focus hogging all attention however, but a spice elegantly mixed in to bring flavour. On the other hand, instead of melancholy Dada Bandits sounds almost celebratory. Gigantic pop choruses reach for the skies and joyous horn sections spice up almost every track (which is pretty heavenly for such a horn section lover as I am), and as a result the album comes off as a positive blast of manic energy. Lyrically things might of course be a whole different matter but at the moment I don’t have my lyrics sheet with me as the physical album’s in a whole different location. Vocalist Artturi Taira’s very characterised vocals (think of Mew’s Jonas Bjerre but less cartoony) make lyric recognisition somewhat hard but work fantastically with the music. At the same time, the band’s already excellent instrumental skills really shine on Dada Bandits, with more and more fantastic keyboard and drum work. And horn sections. Horn sections are always awesome.

Alongside the more confident stylistic approach and overall more polished feel, Dada Bandits’ song material rises generally higher than its predecessors. The thing with Bad Conscience Patrol was that it had some divinely gorgeous songs, but anything that wasn’t like that really paled in comparison (though still being good). Dada Bandits is more even in this sense, its songs backing eachother much better, each song offering at least one downright brilliant moment and several being great in general. “No Escape” follows “Wasteland”’s path in being glorious hook-laden hit material, “Richard Branson’s Crash Landing” contrasts its title with infectiously upbeat summer pop and “Indiana” takes the tempo-switch part-trickery common in the album to its most extreme form, changing shape like a madman at almost every turn. “Karhu junassa” surprises by not being Finnish after all despite its title and starts going like a high-speed train after its mellow start, while the already mentioned “Goji Berries” delights with its quirkiness every time. My favourite moment is experienced halfway through with “Fire Age”, a five-minute ode to amazing keyboard melodies and a glorious chorus that takes simple ingredients and turns it into a classic.

On their second album, Rubik takes some impressive leaps forward and creates what is possibly this year’s the insanely quirky pop / indie rock album. Dada Bandits builds up on everything the band had shown before but expands their palette, tightens their sound and offers us some wonderful songcrafting. If they were American or British, you’d have every music site, forum and blog hyping them up madly. Sadly, for once when there’s a band genuinely worth hyping, no one’s heard of them. Go fix that error.

MP3: Goji Berries
MP3: Fire Age

Myspace
Buy Dada Bandits

Wasteland

Tags: Rubik

This entry was posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.