Song

Hey everybody! Greetings from USA (Tommi) and Lieksa (Riku)!

We're still feeling summery here at Viola Music Club this month, so we bring you a simple story of carefree disco dancing underneath neon lightning and disco thunder! Enjoy!

Neon Lightning (hifi)
Neon Lightning (lofi)

SUMMERTIME!!!

Hey everyone! Those nine long ones are behind us again and we're ready to do our best to grab a hold of yet another fleeting summer!

To help y'all grab yours, here's our musical tribute to one of the coolest - literally - inventions ever: the popsicle!

Popsicle Summer (hifi)
Popsicle Summer (lofi)

Boo-ya!

What combines Kate Bush, Faith No More's Evidence, Phil Collins, Jan Hammer, 2. Maanantai and contemporary R n' B music?

Our new track, that's what.

Leave It All Again (feat. Bääbs) (hifi)
Leave It All Again (feat. Bääbs) (lofi)

HAIL, BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN METAL! FROM THE GRIM AND FROSTBITTEN DARKNESS OF VINNLAND I GREET THEE!

You may notice some changes here. You witnesses at the new birth of Viola, mark II.

Dedicated to all teenage satan worshippers, past and present.

Chaos Shall Reign! (hifi)
Chaos Shall Reign! (lofi)

Winter 2010 has been a pretty thorough one in Finland. Especially snow has been quite plentiful and has caused quite a bit of chaos in people's everyday lives, so we decided it deserved a song dedication from us, so we give you a piece of orchestral goodness: Fade To White.

Fade To White (hifi)
Fade To White (lofi)

This month in Viola Music Club: were a-rockin'!

That's right! It's full-on 110% full steam ahead MIDI rock n' roll from the Viola camp this time.

This month's top achievement: fitting words like "ventriloquist" and "cardiologist" into a carefree indierock lyric.

Heart Breaks Into A Song (hifi)
Heart Breaks Into A Song (lofi)

Welcome to a new year of Viola Music Club, y'all!

To acknowledge the huge fact that we're transferring over to a whole new decade (and to put in our 2 cents into the debate whether it's "the two thousand tens" or "the twenty tens"), here's our highly topical and current track about... the new decade, the 2010s!

2010s (Maybe The World Won't End) (hifi)
2010s (Maybe The World Won't End) (lofi)

Season's Greetings to all you Music Clubbers!

As December is stalking upon us, it's time to get merry! Thus we present to you a sequel of sorts to our 2004 Christmas 7": This Year It Will Be Different!

This Year It Will Be Different (hifi)
This Year It Will Be Different (lofi)

Hi everybody!

To conclude our autumnal triptych of holy melancholy, we present to you a track by the name of No Connection, which might lyrically be one of the darkest Viola tracks yet, so it's fitting we're releasing it on All Hallows' Eve.

No Connection (hifi)
No Connection (lofi)

Dear friends,

As promised, we're continuing along the fall-time in melancholic tunes. Not as deeply wrapped in seas of sound as last month, but in distinctly autumnal tones.

Beautiful Lost Things (hifi)
Beautiful Lost Things (lofi)

Greetings, good people, followers of Viola Music Club!

Sadly, we had to kiss the shimmery summer of 2009 goodbye yesterday as we're now stepping into September and as always, it brings autumn along with it.

So obviously this means it's time to quiet down here at the club as well. It's been a particularly sweaty summer this year as far as our music goes, so it's definitely about time to cool down a bit with some far more mellow sounds.

Sea Curtain (hifi)
Sea Curtain (lofi)

Hi friends!

We've already reached the fifth track of this music club endeavour and this time we've done something we rarely do: recorded a cover song!

So here it is, fully Violated and translated to English: TV-Resistori's ever-so-wonderful 'Näen tanssivan sun uudestaan'!

Oh How You Dance (hifi)
Oh How You Dance (lofi)

Hi Friends!

Here's a little extra summertime treat for you nice people out there! In the end of 2005 we created a remix for our good friends Ultramariini for their third album Kauempana kuin kuu.

Ultramariini - Ikuisesti (Viola remix) (hifi)
Ultramariini - Ikuisesti (Viola remix) (lofi)

SUMMERTIME Y'ALL!!!

Even Finland has gotten a taste of real summer this year for a change, so obviously this calls for celebration and what better way to celebrate than with Viola's first official summer hit!

(Please also vote for S S (S-L-L L) in the Radio Helsinki summer hit 2009 finals!)

Shimmery Summery (Sha-La-La Love) (hifi)
Shimmery Summery (Sha-La-La Love) (lofi)

This month we've got something very special for you good people: a musical and lyrical retrospective on the first 10 years of Viola!

A Decade (hifi)
A Decade (lofi)

Track #2: Nobodylovers. Features the R. Kelly of Meilahti, R. Kärkkäinen on his rap debut. Not the most typical Viola-track again, but we really do like this one.

Nobodylovers (hifi)
Nobodylovers (lofi)

Ok, here we go. Our first free track for this website project...

Cute Destroyer (hifi)
Cute Destroyer (lofi)

TOMMI: The track that initially got us a reputation of being Finland's Mew and I have to admit that they did have a quite huge momentary impact on us at a point. The impact may have even gotten a bit out of hand on some Anything Can Stop Us -tracks, but then again, why not. For a fleeting moment Mew was a pretty damn dumbstrikingly original band and trying to emulate even tiny bits of their sound was kind of interesting.

But aside from that I really do dig this track. In a sense, Tearcandy is a very traditional first album in the sense that most of the material on it is pretty damn old and had lived through several changes in arrangement and even band line-ups. It was pretty much a compilation of Riku's songwriting from about 10 years, so a lot of the stuff had really had time to develop. But then there's stuff on there like Halo Goodbye that's written pretty much at the last moment. Especially the vocal track (melody / lyrics), most of which was pretty much written and arranged as we were recording it. The cool thing is that I really don't think the difference is that huge and that this track blends into the rest of the album quite nicely.

TOMMI: Yet another proof of just how essential Esa "Espe" Mikkonen was to the early Viola-sound. The bass-riff here doesn't just support the song - it IS the song.

Some pretty cool mountaintop guitars going on in this track as well. Thanks to Neil Hannon from Divine Comedy for the inspiration for the multiple vocal tracks in the end. We actually started calling this multi-layered vocal-arrangement technique as "Hannons" at some point. "Should we put some Hannons on this?", "Of course we should!", "Right!"

You can never have too much Hannons.

TOMMI: This is probably how a whole lot of people still picture us - a half-decent yet a bit boring Placebo-esque over-serious semi-gothic rock. I still love this song in hindsight, though. The bass-line is classic Esa Mikkonen material and the overall composition is pretty good. Too bad Tearcandy mostly sounds like crap and this is probably the track that is hurt worst by this fact. The end is a pretty definitive Viola-moment in all it's pompousness. One of our early ventures into the "just put every element of the song on top of each other in the end" -school of arranging stuff.

TOMMI: The first song on our first long play album. Probably for many people the first (and for some, the last) Viola-track they've heard. The string intro pretty much sets the tone of what's to come - home made dramatics all the way.

Henkka (R.I.P., bro!) loved playing this whenever he'd DJ at clubs. It was always kinda cool hearing it in a club PA. The sound sucked really bad, but Henkka used to compensate for it by blasting the track at 1000 db, which always kinda helped making it sound kind of punchy even if it was distorted as hell. He'd always play it so late into the night it didn't really make a difference. People were just blissfully dancing on with imminent danger of permanent ear damage.