Husky Rescue - Ship Of Light

The power of restraint. This might seem a strange concept to get your head around at first, but it’s often that the most minimalist of songs can sound the most powerful. Finnish quintet (we say quintet, but in the past there have been as many as twenty people - yes, really - working with them at times) Husky Rescue are a band that know this very well indeed.

The core of their line-up consists of Marko Nyberg, Reeta Vestman, Ville Riippa, Anssi Sopanen and Miika Colliander, and they have been plugging away at their expertly-crafted ambient-pop for eight years now. Relatively few people outside of their native Finland seem to have heard of them, but their music has been used in a number of advertisements through the years - and they really do need more exposure it seems, because 2004’s ‘Country Falls’ and 2007’s ‘Ghost Is Not Real’ were both exceptional.

However, their long-awaited follow-up ‘Ship of Light’ tops them both, by a considerable distance in fact. It’s the best kind of album: one that creates its own small world for listeners to get lost in. It’s quite diverse, too; while the foundations of the band’s sound remain intact (that is, ethereal ambience and Vestman’s hushed, fragile vocals), the group have clearly pushed themselves.

The record’s first minute is given over to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ambient piece, ‘First Call’, which fades into recent single ‘Sound of Love’, a fantastic left-field pop song. While there are more upbeat moments here, such as the appropriately racing ‘Fast Lane’, and incendiary lead single ‘We Shall Burn Bright’ (which, in itself, is set-up perfectly by the near-instrumental ‘Grey Pastures, Still Waters’), Husky Rescue are most at home when creating slow-burning epics like ‘Wolf Trap Motel’, ‘Ship of Light’’s centrepiece.

However, for all its diversity, this is a very well-structured album, and, crucially, each song here is as immediate as the one that precedes it. The band save the best songs for last, as they strike gold with ‘They Are Coming’ and stirring closer ‘Beautiful My Monster’.

They have just kept getting better, it seems. While ‘Ship of Light’ often dips into slight post-rock territory, the band never stick to the script, saving the moments of catharsis and release for when they are really needed (case in point: the jaw-dropping climax of ‘We Shall Burn Bright’). This is immediate, but there is so much to discover within it; each song is jam-packed yet manages to somehow sound sparse. It’s that power of restraint again, of course: the very thing that makes the album such a captivating listen.