Revisit of the Week: J. Karjalainen - Laura Häkkisen silmät (1998)
Yes yes I skipped another week. I've been busy!
Jukka "J." Karjalainen is a legend of Finnish rock history and one of the country's most beloved singer/songwriters. He's been churning out albums since the start of the 1980s and has somehow managed to hold onto his cultural relevance every decade: there have been brief fallow periods, but it doesn't take long for him to suddenly release a song that completely takes over the nation, re-introduces his name to a brand new generation and which becomes another entry in his long list of Finnish rock evergreens and radio staples. He's never been an innovator or an experimentalist - rather, his strength has been his relatable honesty and gift of melody, which with his world-weary but comforting voice has a way of worming its way into your soul. I, of course, resisted him for absolute yonks - in my teens I was too much of an anglophile to even entertain the idea of listening to some Finnish old fart and later in my adulthood I just never saw a reason to go back and actually understand what he's about beyond my surface level knowledge of his radio hits. The turning point was when I first stumbled onto him on my Finnish #1 singles listening project through his 1988 #1 hit "Hän", the Wilco-esque shuffle of which grabbed me more than it had ever before. At that point I was knee-deep in my personal journey of discovering parts of Finnish music culture which I had overlooked, so this sudden burst of wonderful americana shuffle got me wanting to check Karjalainen's works a bit further. Given so many of his albums are everywhere in Finnish second hand shops and flea markets, I quickly acquired a sizeable Karjalainen collection for damn cheap whenever I visited the old home grounds.
(In retrospect, this is one of the bigger shames I've got in respect of my continued re-appreciation of various parts of Finnish rock history, as I think my dad would've really appreciated me getting into Karjalainen's music - but by the time I started my explorations he was already in a pretty bad shape and, well... it's another lost opportunity really.)
The 1990s were arguably Karjalainen's imperial phase: he'd steadily release an album every couple of years and each of them would contain at least one mega hit which for many other artists would be a career-defining signature song. For Karjalainen, it was just another notch in the belt. 1998's Laura Häkkisen silmät is the final hoorah of this imperial phase - next year's follow-up album Electric Picnic was scrappier and more rushed (by intent?) and knocked the momentum off the rails, and Karjalainen would then spend most of the 2000s doing intentionally smaller-scale passion project excursions before bouncing back again in the 2010s. Karjalainen had formed a new backing band for 1996's Electric Sauna (the band would later retrospectively adopt this as their name) and there was indeed tangible electricity in the new line-up, as their sparking chemistry and palpable energy gave Karjalainen's music the kind of kick and whimsy that it hadn't had for a good while. This translated to more whimsical song structures and a fiery rock and roll energy that resulted in almost jam-like qualities with extended song lengths. Laura Häkkisen silmät is direct continuation from where Electric Sauna left off. Everyone had such a good time the first go-around, let's try and strike while the iron is hot.
Where Electric Sauna was giddily all over the place in style and sound, Laura Häkkisen silmät aims to produce something more cohesive out of the same elements. The energy and excitement are still present and accounted for - you can so clearly tell everyone was having the time of their lives when putting together this album - but there's a more consistent musical throughline across the record. It's bright, warm rock music with soaring chorus and exuberant melodies, where the arrangements are lush with layers of guitars and a gently strumming acoustic in the center grounds them all together, bringing forth Karjalainen's love for folk and americana which is always there in the background. On its final steps the album suddenly goes a little out of bounds: "Vuokses sun" gets a bit trip-hoppy and electronic, and though the closer "Mading" does bring the sound back closer to the rest of the album, the lead vocals being shared with the group's Senegal-born percussionist Mouhamadou Cissokho singing in his native mandingo absolutely gives the song its distinct flair from the rest of the record (Cissokho featured to the same extent on the previous album's huge hit "Missä se Väinö on?", also its respective closer track, and I can't help but feel they're trying to re-do the trick here). But for most parts, this is what you could call Good, Honest Rock Music - uncomplicated but earnest and full of heart. It's not out here to start a revolution, it's here to offer you a bundle of melodies to fill your heart with and keep you company. That's fair play.
I don't really know where I'd place it in a hypothetical ranking of his albums, but the sound of Laura Häkkisen silmät is pretty much exactly what comes to my mind when I think about Karjalainen's music. Maybe that's why it feels like such comfort food for me. Karjalainen is basically synonymous with Finnish music to some degree, and so when I listen to his albums I get that homeland connection that feels more and more important as years go by. That's been a huge reason why I got so deeply into collecting his plentiful discography (still ways to go there too!), because it's represented making a concrete connection with parts of my heritage. Thus, because this album is so emblematic of my immediate association with Karjalainen, it's the one I often randomly pick off the shelf when I'm in the mood for that specific hit. It also played a pretty important part in my blossoming relationship with his music, as it was one of the first albums of his I bought. The fact that it had something exciting to offer beyond the token hit "On kaikki niinkuin ennenkin" (a gorgeously breezy yet yearning number, by the way) made it clear that there's definitely more to Karjalainen than the surface-level impressions I had.
Sometimes all you really need is just a singer with heart and charisma singing simple, earnest songs.
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