Pharaoh Overlord?????

Anybody else listening to "5"? I really disliked it the first time, but it's starting to settle in nicely. There's this effect that Circle/Pharaoh Overlord have on me sometimes, that put them in a rare class, where their music can just make me smile without being overtly cute or funny. The song, "Transgenic Papaya" starting about two minutes in, where for the next two minutes they bring these elements in that all fit so well together and it just clicks in such a pleasurable way - but there's this cheesiness to some of the sounds that is just so unmistakably them

I haven't heard this or any of the newer Circle-related things as I've basically stopped listening to all music that isn't opera/classical the past few years, but I did hear the one track on soundcloud and it was superb of course.

After spending like 15+ years obsessed with these Finnish artists, I think the thing to keep in mind above all with regard to Circle/PO is that rhythm is the subject matter, the point, the raison d'être, and everything else is so much decoration/ornamentation on top of that. When it comes to their chosen form, the ingredients that are usually the point of music are in fact merely icing on the rhythmic cake as it were. Theirs is secretly as close to legit metamusic -- post-modern self-referential music about music -- as performed music gets I think, even more so then the compositions of similarly bloody-minded minimalist composers like Reich and Glass, or Neu! or Can, or whomever -- Jussi & co.'s work being more devoted, more alive, more flexible, more subtle, more righteous, more risky, and more deeply felt. Its stealthy simplicity, and their clearly unshakeable conviction in the power of the rhythmic aspect of music, opens a marvelously malleable revolving door to infinite complexity and variation. If a listener takes the rhythm in PO/Circle for granted, as if theirs is normal harmony-oriented song-centered chord progression music, then I think that listener is very much in danger of missing the forest for the trees... YMMV of course, ha!

In my opinion, for what little it's worth, they're quite simply the best rock band in the world, and have been for quite some time now -- and close to peerless.

I finally got my copy of 5 from Ektro and I really like it! There are so many great little moments.