Husky Rescue – 'Ship Of Light' (Catskills) Released 25/01/10

Land of a thousand lakes, pear cider, salty liquorice, saunas and beautiful women, Finland is a truly wonderful country. But venture into the pine clad woods on a dark winters night and you might just disturb a childhood memory far more unnerving than that of a fuzzy felt Moomin.

What that memory is resists need of explanation, but if it were to be represented in musical form it might sound something like ‘Ship Of Light’, the latest offering from Helsinki based Husky Rescue.

Formed in 2002 by Marko Nyberg with a view to creating arts influenced cinematics, the band loosely operate under the all encompassing ambient-pop descriptive, but if this their fourth album is anything to go by they sure as hell don’t subscribe to Brian Eno’s 1978 view that “ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.”

There is in fact little space to think, or little calm about it, the opening track ‘First Call’ acting as an ominous pre-emptive instrumental warning to the slow, seductive allure of Reeta-Leena Korhola’s melting English, which washes over the painfully delicate yet forcefully binding ‘Sound Of Love’ and squeezebox swirl of ‘Wolf Trap Motel’ like your life depends on it.

Devastatingly hypnotic it’s almost impossible to resist the chameleonic intricacies or escape the shadowy feeling of being watched as the intense guitar of ‘When Time Was On Their Side’ and running tempos of ‘Fast Lane’, ‘Man Of Stone’ and ‘We Shall Burn Bright’ distort emotional hollowness and blur the distinction between hunter and hunted. Yet despite the unseen all seeing company there is an underlying loneliness accentuated through those rare glimpses of space, which, like ‘Grey Pastures, Still Waters’ affords welcome uninterrupted clarity.

A beautiful, haunting and vividly intelligent album to be treated as such, the relentless brutal fragility and dream-spun vocals of ‘Ship Of Light’ are best enjoyed in moderate isolation and have more in common with Eno’s view of the genre than the previous quote may suggest, that ambient music “must be able accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular.”