Thank Christ for Handmade Birds. If it wasn't for this label, I doubt I would have ever found out about Key, at least not until well after their all-too-limited releases would have slipped far from my grasping fingers. I'd somehow remained totally clueless as to the existence of this project even though I've really been getting into the Finnish experimental black metal band Circle Of Ouroborus lately, which is the other band from Key member Rauta. If you've been listening to Circle Of Ouroborus's recent releases like The Lost Entrance Of The Just and Eleven Fingers, the music of Key will feel somewhat familiar. It's shares a similar low-fi post-punk sound, but with Key the black metal influences are nowhere to be found, and instead the duo (which also features Kaarna from the industrial/ambient project Somnivore) combines murky acoustic strings and a ramshackle sort of cemetery folk with their catchy post-punk. The feel is much more whimsical than that of Circle Of Ouroborus's, but there's still a creepy, ghostly streak running through this band...

Birch Skeletons is a beautifully assembled foil-stamped boxset that features three 10" records (all on colored vinyl and housed in their own printed sleeves) and printed booklet, re-issuing the out-of-print demos from this strange Finnish graveyard folk / gloompop band that had been released as a triple-cassette set on Cocainacopia a few years ago. The first, Birch Skeletons, moves through the strange galloping forest-folk of "Slaves Of The Monument" and it's impassioned howling vocals, quickly strummed acoustic guitars, ghostlike flutes, xylophone and driving bass lines, buried industrial clanking and heaps of murky atmosphere, an odd mixture of cavernous post-punk and spectral folk music. It's pretty and creepy and mysterious all at once, songs like the title track and "They Knew None" filled with shambling, jangly melodies that are part Joy Division-style gloompop and part grim neo-folk (a la Death In June), so infectious that the songs linger in your ears long after the record has stopped spinning. On the Skin Lanterns and Lake Of Stars discs, the recordings are a little less murky, the music a little more upbeat, but still dark and supremely catchy. The singer sounds more like a drunken version of Psychedelic Furs front man Richard Butler on these tracks, but the sound is otherwise the same gloomy, melancholy folk-pop formed from driving bass guitar and energetically strummed acoustic guitars, chimes and xylophones and flutes gleaming in the background while those quirky moaned vocals weave scenes of buried teeth and human-shaped lanterns, demonic children and wax sigils. This actually fits right in with a lot of the grimy, gravesoil-stained post-punk that I've been listening to lately from bands like Inkubator, Marching Church, A Black People, Lower, and Looks Of Love. Can't recommend this band and these records enough - the box-set is very limited though, only two hundred and fifty copies produced.