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| Kiki Pau got blog love. |
Music blogs are the medium of the day. it seems Five years ago MySpace was all the rage, bringing us Lily Allen and (ahem) Sean Kingston. Well, that’s completely passé now. Today savvy pop fans are scouring a quagmire of music blogs for the hottest new MP3s instead.
In this new order, blog aggregators – sites that collect the headlines and compress thousands of articles from blogs around the world into a continuous feed of music news – wield great power for stirring buzz around certain artists.
In that regard Helsinki indie rockers Kiki Pau were momentarily the most hyped Finnish band in February, when their digital single An Old Song shot to the top ten of international music blog aggregator Hype Machine’s most blogged songs list. Not bad for a fairly obscure Finnish quartet whose music sounds little or nothing like today’s trendiest groups.
”Well, it hasn’t really materialised into anything concrete yet,” admit singer Henrik Domingo and drummer Olli Juvonen. ”But it’s good, because it means a lot of people have downloaded it and heard it, and hopefully it’ll stick in their minds. If all goes according to plans and we play some shows outside Finland, if people have heard the track they might come and check us out,” Domingo continues.
The single paved the way for Kiki Pau’s second LP, White Mountain, which was released early in March. Perhaps it was the record’s vintage rock band sound that set An Old Song apart from much of the stuff that circulates in the blogs these days, Domingo ponders.
The album may sound timelss enough, but topical themes can be discerned from the lyrics. ”We’ll have to take another loan / to pay another loan,” and so on wails Domingo on the second track. Is this a recession-album, then?
”I wouldn’t say that. There’s a lot of other stuff in that song too,” he counters. ”It’s more about not feeling at home in your own life, you know. It has a transsexual motif as well as a kind of – I don’t know, can you call it trans-economic? – anyway, the idea of a rich man born into the life of a poor one,” he explains.
“There’s actually a lot of that theme on the album as a whole: always striving to go somewhere and maybe not really appreciating the things around you.”
Timeless, ain’t it.
Matti Koskinen
