Like Roger and Boys Of Scandinavia, who we were reviewing earlier today, VELVET GARDEN is an intriguing new Finnish project based predominantly around keyboards rather than guitars.
Yet there all similarity abruptly ends, for while those Helsinki/ Manchester alliances are making synth-pop sounds redolent of the early '80s, Velvet Garden's driving force, Pirita Soderholm (who hails from Turku, rather than Helsinki) has a different agenda altogether.
Although still extremely youthful, Pirita is a jazz group veteran in both Finland and Norway and while she is also currently involved in a prog-rock band called Neil Alien (very Roky Erickson, eh?), jazz-influenced pop remains her first love with Velvet Garden and is broadly the sound of this accomplished three-track demo.
Opener "Near You" is particularly good. It's tremulous, keyboard-driven Europop with melancholy and romanticism in its' heart, but thankfully not too much sentimentality. Pirita's voice is good too: sultry and torch-y and revealing a slightly obsessive lyrical bent on lines like "I took your love and made it mine" where a small, but not unpleasant shiver goes up your spine.
|
Second tune "Driving" betrays a little more of Pirita's love of jazz initially, though when the sequencer-based backbeat enters the picture, it all revs up and speeds away impressively. The finale "Goodbye", meanwhile, is the most sophisticated of the three tracks. It ripples into life via grand piano and gradually develops into a slow, resonant ballad of considerable intimacy.
Pirita herself is keen to complete a full album and put together a full band to tackle live work. These things take time, as we know, but this is likeable and unusually sophisticated music that recalls few obvious contemporaries and suggests this Velvet Garden deserves to be nurtured over time. Good start.
|
