AINO VENNA - MARLENE

1) Waltz to Paris; 2) Electric Soul; 3) Hail Mary; 4) Devil Take Care; 5) Trouble of the World; 6) I'm Not Here; 7) Marlene; 8) Suzette; 9) Tony My Pony; 10) War Song

Music for smoke-filled clubs by a retro-minded old soul trying to do their best to sound convincing.

This is an album that my dad got for me as a present the year it was released. Even though we've both been musically inclined in our lives, my dad very rarely gives me music or music-related things - and when he does, it tends to be something completely unpredictable. He never went into detail why he thought to buy this for me; as far as I know from what he said, it's solely because he read a review of the album and then decided to get it for me on a whim (I don't think he had even heard a single note of the actual music at that point). Aino Venna is a Finnish singer/songwriter and Marlene was her debut album, and its mixture of smoke-covered blues, chanson and old-fashioned folk evidently stood out quite strongly in the Finnish music industry, garnering positive reviews at the time. It was, however, absolutely nothing that I was in the mood for in 2012 and I bounced right off it during my initial listens, and it quickly got more or less buried at the bottom end of my CD shelf where it alphabetically was determined to reside. It took me literal years to even add it to my collection on RateYourMusic because I simply forgot about it for so long, and it's not until over a decade later when I actually began to listen to this instead of relying on the vague memories of those unimpressed first spins.

Those first impressions were admittedly heavily coloured by the very first song, "Waltz to Paris", which is a little bit of a red herring of an opener. Marlene is overall heavily influenced by old blues, jazz and singer/songwriter traditions, so much so that you could call it a love letter for the general vibe of it all, but "Waltz to Paris" lays it on so thick it becomes a pastiche. It paints Venna as someone who clearly thinks they were born in the wrong generation (and the wrong part of Europe) and who considers that as a badge of honour, and regardless whether you're into it or not it starts the listener's expectations on the wrong foot. While openly old-fashioned in its aspirations, the rest of Marlene bears the sound of someone who's using those inspirations to find their own voice, mixing and matching influences to form what is ultimately a very classy and classic kind of acoustic singer/songwriter's album, rife with elegance and a hint of drama. None of that's evident from the accidental genre parody of "Waltz to Paris"

What overall still makes Marlene slightly tricky to process is, well, Venna herself. The songs in Marlene practically beg to be sung in cigarette-filled bars and dimly-lit clubs, on lonely blue-lit stages in front of sad shadows of people drowning their sorrows - but they should also be performed with the cool detachment of a trouble-hearted artisté at work. Venna is, at best, someone who fantasises about belonging in those spaces. She's putting on a decently confident performance but never a convincing one, especially whenever her Nordic accent starts to leak through the cracks of her affected nonchalance. The arrangements across the album are relatively sparse, primarily relying on simple guitar parts with a suave backdrop of double bass and drums, which focuses the spotlight on Venna as the anchor of expression and neither her performance nor her not-bad-but-not-good-either lyrics can really take all that attention at all times. I don't think she's bad at what she does but she does sound green, which is fair play given this is her debut; maybe in her later albums (which I've not heard) she's in full command of every set of ears in those dingy bars with every syllable she utters. Here, it can get all a bit too theatre kid from time to time and it's distracting.

I'm still not entirely sure where I land with Marlene. It's a vibe piece through and through and these days, I can get on with that vibe. Some of its material is also worth a nod of acknowledgment: the traditional "Trouble of the World" and the eerily foreboding and steadily building "War Song" both grow rather nicely, and the quiet waltz "Tony My Pony" has a daydreamy, slightly ethereal elegance to it that would make it perfect both as the last slow dance of the night in a near-empty hall when most people have already left, or soundtracking a surreal dream sequence. The best song of the album is "Electric Soul" which stands steadfastly opposite to absolutely everything else on the record, so make of that what you will - its giddy, country-leaning shuffle is full of sunshine and is more reminiscent of contemporary indie twee folk than any of the album's more notable key influences. It's the one I can most think of returning to outside the album, but that's also primarily because the album as a whole isn't that exciting to frequently come back to. Its songs are ultimately simple and straightforward, relying on a few carefully selected melodies and a whole ton of atmosphere - something like that necessitates a captivating narrator to front the material, and Venna simply isn't that magnetic. It's nice and neat and all that when it's on, but it's so very easy to forget it exists there at the bottom end of the big shelf.

I still keep hold of the CD though. Given how rarely my dad thinks about sharing music with me, I think it's important in its own way to hold onto the few things he has.

Physically: Tri-panel digipak, no booklet and the only lyrics included are those for the title track.