Baulta - Any Fool Can Regret Yesterday
The artwork is mysterious; the title is provocative; they’re a post-rock band from Finland. I had to check this out…
A young girl is touching her mirror image on a rainy wall as four dudes from Finland essentially tell me that I would be no special snowflake for having regrets about the past. With the post-rock genre tagged to this album I rightfully assumed that their point with the title would not be expanded upon because of their lack of a singer, and if I wanted to know more about this, “too bad just enjoy the music dummy”. And so I did.
I am not the most well versed person when it comes to this genre but I still want to say that this is post-rock done right. I don’t want to cling too much to ideas of genre but when an album feels like the embodiment of a genre, to me, it becomes hard to separate the box from its content when the content fits so nicely inside of it.
As I listen to the album, the picture of the girl in the rain that lead me down this rabbit hole keeps appearing in my imagination. I want to connect the music and this image, and as I do, it forces a layer of rain and darkness to cover the haunting intro of the first track, ‘Stormchaser of the Year’ (great song name, by the way). The visual art and the auditory art blend very well, and the rain the music portrays is now more like that which gently leaps on to a window on a cozy day while you’re sipping on a cup of tea than a stormy torrent of a free-falling ocean. Furthermore, we, the listeners, can relax in this vast space that creates the reverb of the drums, an effect which brings enormous size to the soundscape in which we traverse.
As it is so often the case in post-rock, the music has progress and narrative that together build towards a soft-landing crescendo. Whatever gloom that might remain from our first impression is released into a calm ecstasy. And this is why the album shines; the lowest valley and the highest peak in the music are not very far apart in terms of intensity even though it feels like it. The grander musical scale from ambient music to extreme death metal is technically far wider than what is explored in this album, but still the distance this album travels in terms of scaling the mountain from down the valley feels many miles long due to the progression of the music. I sincerely recommend this album for anyone interested in dynamic rock music with a narrative based on the collective musical movement of all its performers. And lastly, I recommend you also take a look at the track titles to embrace the minimalism behind weirdly naming songs and then not having lyrics to expand on the theme of the song. It sums up what so much post-rock tells us; less can be more.
The album is available for purchase and streaming at: https://baulta.bandcamp.com/album/any-fool-can-regret-yesterday
The song ‘Different Me, Brand New You’ on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-6T-Ik03o1Y
