When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day

For fans of Karen Olson, Funeral Songs and Mazzy Star. 'When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day' is the new full-length album from Finnish singer-songwriter Mirel Wagner that surprisingly finds her working with dance producer Vladislav Delay, better known by his moniker Luomo. There is a defiant air of unflinching bravery in her carefully chosen words and the skeletal chords of her acoustic guitar. Her songs are like smooth, polished black pebbles, thrown into a cold bottomless pond, drops of life that set the darkness rippling. Squeezing the last drop of life from a worn out genre, her acoustic balladry is as far as you'll get from clichéd coffee house folk. It has more to do with the primeval oily darkness of Swans than the folksy bonhomie of Bob Dylan. 'When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day' is an impressive set of songs, uniform and cohesive. Wagner ditched a set of older new songs and wrote the majority of the songs up on the peninsula of Hailuoto in northern Finland, in an old log cabin next to the family home of Wagner's manager Aki Roukala. The isolation and relative starkness of the place (no central heating, no electricity) helped bring out the songs.LP with Download.