Quite possibly the weirdest Finnish "doom" band ever, Aarni returns with their second album of bizarre space-cadet art metal; as always, Aarni's music is almost impossible to nail down. When we listed their last album Bathos a few years ago, I called them "art-damaged, lo-fi avant-doom", and that still holds true for the most part, except with this new album Aarni are rocking a much better production, it's heavier and more full sounding than before, and the band has moved even further away from what you would normally recognize as "doom metal".

Just looking at the album cover and going through the booklet for Tohcoth tells you that this is weird shit. The album cover is a freaked out collage of a cartoonish Lovecraftian octopoid monster wreaking havoc in a huge crowd of people while a tower hovers in midair nearby. The rest of the packaging has cartoon artwork of the band depicting them as weird Vedic multi-armed gods, keytar-playing Victorian dandies and, um, an old lady with hair curlers holding a rolling pin as she wafts out of a crock pot like some kind of genie? And despite listing a full band lineup in the booklet (with the "members" Comte de Saint-Germain, Doomintroll, and Mrs. Palm all included in the credits), I'm pretty sure that Aarni is really just a one-man band, the project of one Master Warjomaa, who also plays in the much less bizarre doom band Umbra Nihil. In Aarni though, Master Warjomaa plays all of the instruments and handles all of the vocals except for the majority of the drumming, and Tohcoth continues his fascination with stitching together old school deathdoom a la My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost with mutant jazz, demented 70's prog rock and krautrock with textured electronic noise and Aleister Crowley samples into a set of seriously fucking weird songs that are obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. The heavier stuff sounds like a weird bedroom version of old school deathdoom, all plodding guitars and glacial tempos but played over a chintzy drum machine, with the infrequent deathgrunt belted out over top. But the doomy parts are only a small part of this album; the rest of Tohcoth includes some loosely played Pink Floyd -inspired rock with deep, uber-dramatic and Gothy baritone singing that reminds me of Michael Gira from Swans, trippy blackened prog-metal that is kind of like hearing Agalloch on peyote buttons, trumpets, speed metal riffs, clean folk guitars, Caribbean rhythms, lots of awesome 70's style Moog synths beamed straight off of Emerson Lake And Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery and Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans...man, this whole album sounds like it might have started off as crushing Euro doom metal, but somehow fell into a timewarp and was zapped back to the early 70's where it was discovered by a bunch of shaggy haired prog rockers and rewritten/reshaped into an overblown, overindulgent Lovecraft-obsessed progressive rock epic, but then got zapped back to the present day with it's DNA all scrambled, and became this. It's pretty whacked out.

Just check out their thanks list: "Black Sabbath, Camel, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Kayo Dot, Opeth, RObert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Hakim Bey, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Salvidor Dali, David Lynch, Monty Pythons Flying Circus, David Cronenberg, Patrick McGoohan...."

Patrick McGoohan? The British character actor from the cult 60's series The Prisoner? What the hell. It's just one more strange non sequitur in an album that's freakin' filled with them. Aarni's brain-damaged, prog overloaded is pretty genius though. A wonky mix of epic 70's progressive rock, Skepticism, King Crimson, Agalloch, My Dying Bride, Hawkwind, Candlemass, folk metal, the dark electro-gloom-pop of Beyond Dawn, and Captain Beefheart? It's that weird. And awesome. Awesomely weird.