- Sasu Ripatti’s music blossoms in the disconnect between his intended meaning and our received expectations. What to make of an interviewee who says ‘I don’t go clubbing’ then comes to Tokyo’s Liquid Room and virtually fucks his laptop in front of everyone? What to make of an artist who produces what is regarded as a ruptural, revolutionary album (‘Vocalcity’) and then calls it a ‘failure?’ What to make of a musician who works in the space between arrhythmia, silence and narcotic mania and then votes Massive Attack’s ‘Blue Lines’ as his desert island album and cites Timbaland and MeShell Ndegeocello as desired collaborators?
In the case of Luomo, it seems as if the tacit goal of the project has been to arrive at a very simple pop-house song through an at times meandering, at times excruciating, at times sublime string of nodally connected tangents. The problem and joy of all these crossed lines is that Ripatti’s ‘successful’ attempts to play it straight produce bright shining monsters – unwittingly fey, cheesy, stiff pap like ‘Cold Lately’, crummy digital disco like the throwaway ‘Waltz for Your Eyes’, unimaginative Michael-Jackson-cribbing schmaltz fiascos like ‘Running Away’ or any one of his generally bland remixes. Yet where he lets the caked-on makeup crack and the structures splinter and yawn, works of genius like the original version of ‘Tessio’ and ‘The Present Lover’ emerge. Like his laptop, Ripatti’s work is best when it gets thoroughly fucked and is left, dare I say it, gaping.
‘Paper Tigers’ pounces on the listener’s ears out of the tense middle ground between the crumbling chasms (where he moves effortlessly) and the polished, crafted pop terrain his talent has so much trouble with. The audible result is a pleasurable plateau that nudges some of his pop desires toward the edges of the slow troughs of ‘The Four Quarters’ and even, at times, the peaky instabilities of ‘Demo(n) Tracks’ without ever pushing them right over into the void. It’s a housetrained kinda chaos in the service of often beautifully (de)formed pop songs.
The single ‘Really Don’t Mind’ has a lot in common with the size, scope and structure of its Present Lover-era EP siblings: club-functional, between eight and nine minutes long and using a delayed, reverbed female vocal to drive the groove toward an idiosyncratic breakdown that (eventually) comes messily, and at length. If ‘Really Don’t Mind’ pairs with ‘Diskonize Me’, then ‘Good to be With’ recalls ‘The Present Lover’, which might be this writer merely saying they like the latter pair. Jammed in the middle is ‘The Tease is Over’, whose Roisin Murphy doing Billie Holiday (over a laptop) vocal, care of Johanna Ilvanainen, approaches something like the failed ‘successes’ of Luomo’s earlier pop excesses. Then there’s the dud track ‘Let You Know’, a blasé shuffler that you might find as a B-side on a pop-oriented Kompakt release.
It’s the tracks that vary the pace that make the album hang together beautifully, like the lowkey ‘incidental-instrumental’ number ‘Cowgirls’ or the closer ‘Make Believe’, which sounds like the truncated (or abandoned) ‘Fifth Quarter’ of last year’s wonderful ‘Four Quarters’ under his Vladislav Delay moniker. But the high point of the album has to be ‘Wanna Tell’, a gorgeous transfiguration of Sasu’s stutterfunk R&B longing into an unlikely anthem to interrupted romance. Just like the rhythms and vocals trapped between repetition and interruption, the song perfectly says what it doesn’t, crescendoing with: ‘I can’t even/I can’t even/I can’t even/I can’t even/I can’t/ I can’t/I can’t/I can’t even trust you… /but you wanna tell me more stories/ and more stories…’ Close, repeated listening to this track has revealed, to me at least, that Sasu has finally achieved the Luomo that both he and we needed this whole time. It’s been a messy trek, but wonderfully satisfying, in the end.
Tracklist1 Paper Tigers
2 Really Don't Mind
3 Let You Know
4 The Tease Is Over
5 Cowgirls
6 Good To Be With
7 Dirt Me
8 Wanna Tell
9 Make Believe