Hiskias Möttö & Mojakka
Three years ago, Hiskias Möttö & Mojakka amazed and charmed the audiences at the Töminä Club. This time they take to the stage at the neighbouring Sulo Club. Now here's an opportune moment for putting on your glad rags and imagining you're going to the local dance hall to shake a leg a bit, just like the old Finnish Americans back in the backlands of Minnesota used to do.
The band's original raison d’être was to give a new life to the classic songs of Hiski Salomaa, a Finnish-American troubadour from the early years of the 20th century. But since then the combo has also taken songs from almost any other genre – often punk rock, since the vocalist has lived a long second life in the undergrowth of Finnish punk – and masticated them into a kind of folk music, true to its colloquial roots but offering enough references to the common consciousness of Finnish popular music to please even the finer tastes.
With their newly-released debut album Värssyjä Hiski Salomaan laulukirjasta, Hiskias Möttö engages in priceless heritage preservation work by making the songs of Hiski Salomaa familiar to indie kids whose mothers and fathers were born long after Salomaa himself had passed away. But the songs were originally intended as a soundtrack for behaving wildly and being frowned upon, and that's how they should be enjoyed even today. According to one critic, the album sounds like Manu Chao and The Pogues were having a beer together at your local. What more can you expect? It's educating, it's enlightening, it's as fun as a barrel of monkeys!
www.mojakka.net
myspace.com/mojakka
