2025-09-25
22-Pistepirkko - Eleven
Original release: 1998
No matter how much great music 22-Pistepirkko releases, Eleven remains my favorite album of theirs. It hits the perfect balance between dirty, heavy blues rock and electronic music. They were getting there, but not quite hitting it, with their previous album, Rumble City LaLa Land, and then on Eleven they absolutely hit it out of the park. The song-writing is phenomenal and interesting, the sound is gritty and rough, which makes it feel very analog, authentic and tactile, despite a lot of the music being ’90s MIDI, but the delivery and the make-up of analog and electronic instrumentation just fucking works. Some argue that they executed the rock/electronic mix even better on their following album, Rally of Love, and while that may be true, Eleven has an air of discovery, authenticity and naivite that I really, really like.
There are so many unique and fascinating elements in this album. The loud, dominating (and sometimes booming and reverberating) guitars in Sad Lake City, the unexpected key change in the chorus of Onion Soup, the changes in sonic space in Boardroom Walk from the relatively close-up acoustic singer-songwriter mix to the grandiose string arrangement with reverb for days, and then you have Let The Romeo Weep with its light drum n’ bass-y beat, or the somewhat dark and industrial Frustration with that crazy machine-like sample in the chorus. And through it all they never fail to remind you that they are—at heart—a rock band. So while this album may sound like it is all over the place, it feels very much like a single, coherent thing where one song naturally follows the other.
Listen
- Sad Lake City: https://youtu.be/FL4Az6Le_dc
- Onion Soup: https://youtu.be/JaPauVX3cCo