Stinako (Stina Koistinen) releases her third full length album, ‘Visions of Future’ just as such visions take on a nightmarish aspect for the world’s citizens and no-one is exempt. The Old World Order collapses a bit more with every passing day while the ‘New’ one offers nothing but strife, turmoil, despondency and the distinct probability of being wiped out as the dinosaurs were, not by an asteroid but by an errant computer programme that hasn’t been taught any morals and thinks only about itself.
I wonder who it got that from.
In fact you might argue that it’s brave even to release an album with such a title; that it might be misinterpreted as a sequel to Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World. Except that neither author could have imagined in their wildest dreams a world populated by and ruled over by the likes of Trump, Hegseth, Musk, Putin, Xi, Kim Jong Un and the Ayatollahs.
But Stina Koistinen remains undaunted. She said in a recent interview, “Originally I was making an album about the wonders of life, and of course some of the songs still have that theme. Eventually, however, the lyrics started to deal more with the state of the world and the hope for a better future.” She adds that she dreams of a world without those people. Amen to that.
And it is hope that is the foundation stone of the album.
I was hard pressed to find the most appropriate sample track. Any one of them would have done the trick and been a treat (I had to say that on Halloween) and we previously reviewed the album’s title track, concluding that she knows how to ratchet a ballad up into a full blown anthem as well as anyone. It has become something of a trademark of hers.
I considered ‘My House’, the fifth of the eight tracks, a sanctuary from the madness wherein hope flourishes, and which features, as most of them do, the wind section of the mini big band Njet Njet 9 and the Sibelius High School girls’ choir and which develops from a gentle ballad into a full blown storm with a recurring emergency services-like two tone siren blaring in the background as that bastion of normality, reason and hope comes under attack from forces that may be too strong for it to withhold.
Incidentally, it did cross my mind if the big band’s title is wordplay on the Russian ‘niet, niet’, a statement of abject denial. It is pretty much the same word in Finnish. Just wondering…
But in the end I opted for ‘Oceans’, the third track, because it epitomises everything that Stinako is about to my mind and one which ties together themes such as radical kindness – imagining a world driven by mutual respect across species, ecosystems and, yes, oceans – and ecological empathy – by employing water imagery (and it follows the previous track ‘Cold Water’) – to anchor themes of environmental stewardship.
In it she addresses someone – it might even be her own alter ego – to admit that she can’t see the world through their eyes, that they “see different kind of skies” and that:
“I love you dearly/But there is no way out of this”.
It is almost the converse of hope lyrically, as if she’s thrown in the towel, but the rising , comforting gospel overtures of the outro, which forms a coda to the piece, suggest that a way will be found, come what may.
It is yet another consummately written and produced track and album from one of the most gifted writers in Finland.
Oh, and here’s something else to ponder. I discovered a while ago now that Stina isn’t the greatest fan of Finnish outfit Nightwish, which is my favourite band as regular readers may know.
But it strikes me that she is broaching here exactly the same themes as Nightwish has done throughout its history – melancholy, hope, the wonders of life and the universe, the future of the world, environment and ecology, even oceans, which are a recurring, deeply personal motif throughout that band’s history and that of its chief writer.
To paraphrase the final lines from that band’s ‘The poet and the pendulum’, Stina,
“Search for beauty, find your shore
Try to save them all, bleed no more
You have such oceans within”…
Find her on:
Website: https://www.stinakoistinen.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stinakomusic
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stinak0/
