MAGENTA SKYCODE

Main chronology:

• 2006: IIIII
• 2010: Relief

Other Sjöroos projects:

Fu-Tourist

• 2002: The Universe Is for Us

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Main Chronology

IIIII

1) Hands Burn; 2) People; 3) Compassion; 4) Open Air; 5) Pleasure of Love; 6) I Know You're Sleeping With Your Dolls; 7) Go Outside Again; 8) Luvher Oh Hater; 9) Red Eyes; 10) This Empty Crow

Big songs, big production - enough to create emotional heights from those grand swoons alone.

Jori Sjöroos is a man of many hats. Since the 1990s he’s been splitting his abundance of time between a vast amount of different names, restlessly starting and ending projects on a whim and in process quietly become one of the most ever-present names in Finnish music while largely keeping himself out of the actual spotlight. He's gone from the doom metal of Thergothon to the trendy and radio-friendly club beats of Fu-Tourist, and from cult success with This Empty Flow to actual critical and commercial success as the invisible third member of PMMP. Sjöroos has stretched his wings far and wide across his career, launching new projects each time he wants to try doing something new but most of the time he’s remained intentionally in the background for each of them, the connections between the albums only clear for those who read liner notes. Magenta Skycode is one of the few times when Sjöroos earnestly became the leading star in one of his CV entries, taking on the role of the frontman of a band though in reality he wrote and recorded everything by himself behind the scenes anyway. Magenta Skycode's relatively short period of existence is in tandem with the rise of PMMP where Sjöroos wrote and produced some of the catchiest and most openly direct music of his career for entirely different front personnel to put their lyrics to, and though different from a genre perspective Magenta Skycode comes across like a way present that more melodic direction he'd been immersed in with his own voice front and center.

The widescreen sound of IIIII has its roots in both 80s goth rock and the bombastic indie of its time period, but its core lies in pop-like instancy of its melodies. With Sjöroos being a producer first and foremost, he coats his melodies in kitchen sink antics and a pristinely perfect, multilayered sound. It’s all unashamedly high and mighty, but it’s guided with a vision - each layer highlights the strengths of the melodies churning in the core of it all and the production makes all those layers apparent. The one thing that Sjöroos does bury is his own vocals, which appear as largely incomprehensible series of syllables following a melody (with no lyrics in the booklet to help decipher them); thus the attention moves completely to the actual sound and the strength of the rest of the songwriting, both of which can withstand the extra scrutiny. IIIII sounds really beautiful, from the light twang of the bass groove to the shimmering guitars and shining keyboards - the band line-up may be a facade but Magenta Skycode do somehow sound like a genuine group of musicians banded together with a real dynamic based on the way the instruments interact (the drums are a constant highlight especially). They're lush and clear, while still having the type of warmth these studio-perfected records sometimes miss.

The dark-clad visuals of IIIII are a red herring: Magenta Skycode is Sjöroos' vehicle for indulging in any stadium torchlight anthem fantasies he has and so he plays them bright and loud. It's exciting and exhilirating in a way pop music does best, where each regal melodic swoon comes like a moment of victory worth cheering for, where each grabbing chorus is a rollercoast riding the thrilling downhill. It's all really confident in its own skillset, and Sjöroos has got the songs to back that ego up. His creativity was at its peak during this time as evidenced by the music he was writing for PMMP simultaneously, and IIIII comfortably rides that same imperial phase train. “People” and “Compassion” stomp with a rhythm-driven urgency as they throw in new hooks and layer old ones with each go-around, “Open Air” and “Go Outside Again” harmoniously reach out in wide open gestures in accordance with their titles, “Hands Burn” is the kind of a majestic slow-burn opener that would make any major publication’s year-end song list, (the horribly titled) “Luvher Oh Hater” and “Red Eyes” lean fully into the album’s ambitions of grandeur and present real stadium soarers, the former with one of the album’s biggest choruses and the latter with a fantastic instrumental finale with Sjöroos indulging in dramatic guitar solo gestures. Each song on IIII strives to be a capital Moment, even the slightly filler-adjacent vibe check "I Know You're Sleeping With Your Dolls" which brings the album to a moment of quiet before a sequence of multiple epic finales in a row in its back half. The excellent thing is, he manages to pull that off for most of the record.

I do readily admit though that my love for IIIII is purely superficial. The production is beautifully perfect in a strictly hifi-ist way, and that's an approach that works for me by default when it's done this well and the songs themselves have rich melodies for days - strictly as a piece of music, IIIII simply sounds great. The superficiality comes in on how I don't find this a particularly deep record, and that’s largely in part to how the music is constantly fixated on delivering those instant highs while the vocals are pushed to the back, so the intended emotional tone remains a mystery and the songs only speak with the exciting rush of cinematic hooks exploding in the sky. I don't think that's an indictment against Magenta Skycode or IIIII - the second Magenta Skycode album opens up by stating "the simple pleasures are the greatest" and I feel like that's a motto that speaks for the whole project. The songs on IIIII pull towards their exciting dramatic archs with staggering intensity every time the album is on, and that is absolutely more than enough to create a completely captivating record. If you're a fan of maximalist melodies and grand gestures, then IIIII is an easy bet.

Physically: Jewel case with a fold-out booklet with a lot of empty space, no lyrics. In a very Manic Street Preachers-esque fashion there's a sleeve quote: "Anything too stupid to be said is sung" -Voltaire.

RELIEF

1) The Simple Pleasures; 2) Kipling; 3) Night Falls on the Rifle; 4) Sometimes; 5) King of Abstract Painters; 6) Trains Are Leaving the Yard; 7) The Old World; 8) Escaping Outdoors; 9) Montag; 10) We're Going to Climb / Kipling (Reprise)

Moving onto lighter and airier fields from the debut, still scaling grand heights and brimming with melody but more at peace - and more resonant.

I finished the review for IIIII by explaining its power via a quote from Relief: "the simple pleasures are always the deepest". That was the motto why the debut's pop majesty - the moments of melodic bombast with pitch-perfect production, sweeping choruses and majestic peaks - worked so well even though, if you assess it with cold logic, it's hardly a unique album and Jori Sjöroos' flimsy front of a band had the personality of a well equipped studio. Sometimes all you need is just a song that slaps without any greater emotional resonance. The irony of using that quote from Relief is that as far as the two albums go, Relief is the one which actually goes beyond that.

The basic recipe is still as formerly described but in comparison to the stylishly moody IIIII, the blinds have been pulled back and the windows have been opened. The palette for Relief is brighter and airier, and the songs sound more open and positively glow, welcoming the listener in rather than suavely hiding in the dark club corners like the predecessor did. It's an album perfect for the spring: the soundtrack for the world moving on from the dark of winter and the snow melting under the sunshine to reveal patches of green grass coming to life, air filled with a crisp freshness. It's also much less of a 'band' album and it quietly drops the whole rock band pretense of the debut. Sjöroos has a couple of helping hands here (including his PMMP compatriots Paula Vesala and Mira Luoti in blink-and-miss backing vocal roles) but ultimately Relief has the air and aura of a classic multi-talented singer/songwriter/producer's album, where each song is given anything that suits the vibe its creator is trying to pin down and where recreating anything in a live setting is a completely secondary concept. By also moving away from the whole "ordinary band plays stadium songs" shtick, Sjöroos opens up Magenta Skycode's sound to less rigid structures, with sections where there's sometimes little distinction between a build-up and a verse and in fact where entire songs can almost act as dramatic payoffs to prior ones. The Chorus is still the center that everything else seeks towards in order to reach that perfect torchlight waving moment - and Relief has a ton of instantly great moments like that - but how the songs get there now is a different matter. It's probably my highly seasonal associations with this album but the one adjective that always comes to my mind is "natural", as in of nature - the songs play out like a wild growth of instruments and arrangements, in the center of which is a path to the lofty destination.

The new approach unlocks what kept IIIII away from reaching that next, more personal level that was readily in its sights but still beyond its grasp. Relief overall sounds more personal and, well, less like a stylistic experiment of a project and more like a vessel for human expression. Sjöroos' voice is less buried in the mix this time and while he's not necessarily the world's greatest lyricist or a singer, he's so much more confident here than he's ever been before and he soars through Relief with confidence and boldness without hiding himself with production techniques, which adds another layer to the album's overall earnestness and openness. It sounds beautifully at peace and overflowing with personal richness, expressed through these giant arches of melodies and multi-layered arrangements - and for once, Sjöroos' own voice clearly in the middle. It'd be hard to call him anything but a creator without limits (given his multi-project discography) but Relief feels personal and the title feels apt for it, as the weights fall off the shoulder.

As far as the actual songs go, the heavy hitters come up right at the start as Relief doesn't hesitate to start high. "The Simple Pleasures" (quoted earlier) is the big pop song to nail down the album's epic scales right from the beginning and it just gets bigger and bigger with each go-around to more and more majestic results, "Kipling" details the record's more free-flowing creativity with its mantra-like verses (if it's appropriate to call them that) and the sprawling jungle of melodies that wraps around the central shuffling beat that rides the song into the grand horizon, and "Night Falls on the Rifle" adds a touch of darkness from the debut to contrast against the rest of the album's light, eventually revealing its full colours in its harmony-laden chorus that deserves all the repeating it gets. From the opening salvo Relief moves onto a more understated middle section, but letting things calm down a little brings out some of the best qualities of Relief the clearest. The opening trio might be the best songs of the record, but in particular the flow from "King of Abstract Painters" to "Escaping Outdoors" is where all those nature analogies shine the brightest (sometimes literally, "Escaping Outdoors" and all), with an everpresent lush flurry of melodies and extended atmospheric build-ups really invoking that spring morning atmosphere of stepping out into what feels like a new world. They're slightly subtler songs than the big anthem threesome that opens the record, but the melodies are among the album's - and Magenta Skycode's - loveliest and they're honestly the kind of songs you want to wrap yourself into.

They also resonate, and that's the big thing. IIIII I enjoyed because it's full of bangers (simple as), but Relief actually works its way to me on an emotional level, all to do with those abstract seasonal sensory memories it has despite it actually making little sense (the album was released in October, I got a copy of it in December and my actual memories of it revolve around my time in university in the UK where you just get a weird weather mush that largely blurs together for 12 months instead of clear seasons that would generate seasonal vibes). Even "Montag", the one somewhat ill-fitting song here thanks to its atypically lurching tempo and its melodramatic gothic agony that's at odds with the rest of the album's mood board (from which the grand come-together finale "We're Going to Climb" launches off gloriously), has warmed up to me over the years because it's reached that point where it evokes some actual memories of my university campus that I cherish in my nostalgic rabbit's hole. Thanks to the new approach to songwriting and presentation, the same qualities that won over on IIIII are now able to turn these songs into scenes made out of audio that you can see yourself stepping into, and that vividly atmospheric touch edges it over into a great album. It's a shame that tis where Sjöroos decided to park the project apart from one last EP a few years later: on Relief Magenta Skycode started to turn from one project among others into an artistic vehicle with its own personality, and it would've been interesting to hear where he'd take it from here.

Physically: Digipak, the booklet is textless (apart from credits) and each page is a zoom-in on one of the scenes depicted in the relief of the cover (which in itself isn't shown in full on the front).

Other Sjöroos Projects

Fu-Tourist

The one-off one-man dance pop project that burned fast but oh so bright and loud.

THE UNIVERSE IS FOR US

1) Amaze; 2) You Come Alive (Take Control); 3) Remedy; 4) Night Ride; 5) Ordinary; 6) You Could Be Mine; 7) Big Trouble; 8) The Universe Is for Us; 9) Out of Your Head; 10) New World Stranger; 11) Getting to Know You; 12) King Kong of the Dancefloor

An all-out futuristic dance pop explosion that might outstay its welcome a little.

After spending the 90s with Thergothon's doom metal and This Empty Flow's gothic dream pop, Sjöroos started the new millennium with his first full-on solo project as Fu-Tourist. No matter which direction of his time and lives you approach it from, it's still a wild curveball: nothing else in his collected works comes close to these balls-to-the-walls dance anthems in the trendiest, glossiest production that 2001 could give you, with big beats and bigger hooks. The Fu-Tourist years also gave him his first taste of real visibility with "King Kong of the Dancefloor" - not a proper hit per se, but its video frequently appeared in various domestic music programs and the song itself received enough airplay to at least register in people's minds. Certainly my mind, anyway - I didn't hear The Universe Is for Us in full until the late 2010s but just a small taste of "King Kong of the Dancefloor" in the early 00s had left the song on replay in my mind and in my miscellaneous mp3s folder, where it received its due airings regularly. That kind of longevity is worth some props.

There isn't really much more to The Universe Is for Us than what's already been mentioned above. Its twelve tracks are all high-gloss, high-tempo giants designed to explode on the dance floor of some futuristic dance club in the year 3000 (or what someone in the year 2001 thought it would be like) or on the race track of a cool-above-all PS2 racing game. The huge choruses are hammered in with shiny synth riffs and superbly catchy vocal melodies, with Sjöroos' voice covered in an artificial auto-tune smoothness that makes it all the more charismatic in this environment. That's precisely it for all of its 51 minutes, never stopping, never diverging. Admittedly it's a great trick in capable hands and Sjöroos certainly has them - he's a real wizard with hooks and each song consistently hits the mark in quality, energy and sharp melodies. It's simply an awful long amount of time for a single trick. How much you get on with The Universe Is for Us depends entirely on how much you can take its one mode of action before your attention starts to drift off. For me it's usually around the 40-minute mark, though I'll emphasise that doesn't coincide with any drop in quality towards the end either, as I'd say the sugary rush of "Getting to Know You" is one of the album's highlights. So much of the album is actually quite great in isolation and it packs some undeniable bangers within which ought to find a place in any self-respecting party playlist, particularly the daydreamy euphoria of "Amaze", the jerky "Big Trouble" (with its entertaining lyrical references to "King Kong of the Dancefloor", almost as if we're getting a sneak peek) and the fantastic title track which has this dangerously magnetic pull that takes over with sheer commanding force until you're making up choreographies on the spot. There are a few moments where the energy tones down to catch a breath but it's only ever so slightly, and when "You Could Be Mine" and "New World Stranger" find their lift-offs they're back on the motorway, even if a little below the speed limit. Taking the album all in one go can start to get a bit too much, like you are eating an entire cake by yourself and then two more are wheeled in before you.

Funny enough, it's the signature hit "King Kong of the Dancefloor" which is actually a bit of an outlier. Not much, but its less hyperspeed tempo opts for a stop-start funk groove rather than relentless four-to-the-floor like the rest of the record, and that gives it its own distinct sonic space: made even more apparent by its placement as the last song, leaving the impression it could've been a last minute addition tacked on to the end quickly. But what a magnificent pop song it is - and a really daft one too ("I've got glow sticks like Obi-Wan"), but it plays its catchphrases with emotionless cool that in turn makes them feel so cool and suave. Riding on top of that sharp but still swaggery beat and escalating into its hand-raising post-chorus - the real highlight of the track - it's irresistably danceable and limitlessly enjoyable. It's a real Finnish classic in my books and as such, way above everything else on the album, but The Universe Is for Us gives it a bit of a fight anyway.

The Universe Is for Us was another Sjöroos one-and-done standard, though hopping onboard the PMMP train a year later probably snatched all his time for the next several years. And honestly, I'm not sure if there is anything left to say with this method of expression. The album knows what it goes for and then really goes for it, and it's such a delight! It has the power to snap you out of any stupour and automatically gets the body moving and boogieing - and in all honesty, though I've raised the overlong one-noteness of this record as its issue (the reason there's a 7 there), every once in a blue moon you do want something that's just bops all the way through with nothing "contemplative" or "contrasting" to break the mood. Those moods are rare, though, and my more usual experience of The Universe Is for Us is patches of pure euphoria interweaved with brief periods of complete blackouts where the tunes just wash over saying nothing - but they're never the same moments. It's a strong one-off with a distinct personality, another fun feather in Sjöroos' hat, and it's also a perfect example of what consistent to a fault means.

Physically: Standard transparent jewel case, the booklet folds out to a wider cartoon landscape in line with the cover with more monsters and aliens. Interestingly my copy's got a sticker on the booklet saying it's a promo copy not intended for sale - definitely doesn't look like one.

[Reviewed: 25/03/2025]