Kiila’s third album finds the Finnish group still happily where it wants to be — exploring fragile but often energetic folk/rock hybrids for a new century’s world-wide audience. If Kiila’s exclusively singing in Finnish may seem to limit their outside appeal on the one hand, it probably increases it on the other (as anyone who has suffered through some of the overwrought attempts at poetry in the field can attest) — with the focus mostly on their careful arrangements and calm, slightly rough-edged harmonies, Kiila exercises some admittedly obvious fetishes in the service of a good listen. The ghosts of acts ranging from the Incredible String Band to later Current 93 to any number of modern acid-folk practitioners hang heavy — hearing the results when a compressed feedback crunch provides dramatic shading to fiddle and singing before the whole thing turns into a percussion/string scraping jam on “Portaissa” — or feeling the slow-then-fast rave-up and hoe-down of “Kehotuslaulu,” as if Appalachia relocated to Karelia — it’s all a good kind of borrowing. The hushed, careful start to the whole disc, “Vissi Hirvasta,” makes for an elegant role model that they could have easily pursued for the entire album, but the fact that Kiila didn’t simply stop there is all the more to their credit — especially when the final song, the absolutely befuddling (in all the best ways) improvisational weirdness of “Pöllötulkin Mietteet,” ends the album on an incredibly strong note. – Ned Raggett
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