Kiki - Kaiku (CD)

All Music Guide

Considerably less bright and boisterous than 2004's Run with Me, Finnish producer Kiki's second album for Bpitch Control nonetheless goes in as many directions as its predecessor. Its results are just as mixed. Some of Kaiku's sparsely arranged downtempo material quickly settles into inert background music, as in "Good Voodoo," a house anthem addled by chronic fatigue, and "No Words Necessary," a wheezing plod that would work better as a 90second piece of incidental film music than an eightminute track in the middle of the album. The pleasing twists come with "Immortal," a dancefloor lament where cello is added as an element that enhances with suspense and a sense of mourning (like the best of Richard Davis' Details), the stealth "Death Railway" (if not as severe as its title suggests), and the truly odd "Twins," full of ominous swells of syntheticstring vapor and a raspy spoken vocal that makes the mundane darkly comical: "She told me she has two kids, and she said...that they're twin...s...twins, twins, twins...." - Andy Kellman, All Music Guide Read more Less