KimiKarki_008

Kimi Kärki - "Beyond Distance feat. Patrick Walker"

Nothing like the words “featuring Patrick Walker” to make your ears perk up. In both Warning and 40 Watt Sun, Walker has earned his reputation as a master of everything slow and sad. If you’re a fan of emotionally resonant music (which we happen to be here at Invisible Oranges), seeing his name next to a song is an assurance that you are in good hands. This is doubly true when Walker’s name is next to Kimi Kärki’s. Like Patrick Walker, Kärki made his name first as a doom metal giant, one third of the now defunct Reverend Bizarre, but has since mellowed out under his eponymous project. Now Kärki is primarily a folk singer, and is currently gearing up for the release of his second solo record, Eye For An Eye.

“Beyond Distance”, a full collaboration between Kärki and Walker, both in songwriting and performance, is the crown jewel of Eye For An Eye. While it’s a far cry from the preposterously heavy and long-winded music that Kärki made with Reverend Bizarre, “Beyond Distance” shows that he hasn’t lost his touch for making the most out of a small number of ingredients. What made Reverend Bizarre special was their ability to encode traditional song structures into their lengthy doom workouts. Even when songs blossomed to nearly half an hour in length, it was still easy to trace a verse to a chorus and back. Given that, it’s no surprise that Kärki’s fundamentals would translate just as well to a stripped down folk setting. “Beyond Distance” revolves around two simple chord progressions and two part harmony, first Walker’s dual performance and then between Anna-Elena Pääkkölä and Pirita Känkänen. Everything else in the song is filigree. It’s power comes from its transparency, the way each note of the melody plays off the simple but evocative harmony beneath it.

The song’s accompanying video, which you can watch below, is similarly parred down. It mostly consists of slow motion shots of octopodes (neat!) the sun shimmering off of the surface of water (beautiful!) and still shots of band members (uh, ok!). Nothing in the video interferes with the integrity and delicacy of “Beyond Distance” itself, and the light reflected off of the water does make for a nice visual echo of the electric guitars hovering at the corners of the mix. More than anything the video implies what the song itself makes explicit; a deep and unsatisfied longing, one that cannot be overcome by simply travelling over the sea. That longing permeates Eye For An Eye, but is crystallized on “Beyond Distance”

Watch “Beyond Distance” below. Eye For An Eye comes out on 8/18 via Svart Records. You can also find tour dates Warning’s USA tour, presented by Invisible Oranges, below.

Warning — 2017 Tour Dates
08/20 Las Vegas Psycho Las Vegas
08/22 San Diego Brick By Brick
10/15 Seattle Highline^
10/17 Portland Tonic Lounge^
10/18 San Francisco DNA Lounge^
10/20 Phoenix Club Red^#
10/22 Austin Barracuda#
10/26 Chicago Reggies#
10/28 New York Le Poisson Rouge#
10/29 Baltimore Days Of Darkness
10/31 Boston ONCE Ballroom
^=support from The Body
#=support from Thou
10/15-10/20=support from Worm Ouroboros