Haruko: Wild Geese (Bracken Records, 2009)
I’m not sure does it make me a sad case that I’ve always considered records as my friends. Maybe it’s the fantasy land of an anti-social boy/man/whatever, but that’s the way I want to treat records. After all, these treasures can learn to know more about you than your closest friends.. Well I suppose if ones writes gushing emotion-filled reviews about these friends, the “real” friends might learn to know the same feelings that were born when one’s heart and the core of the record melted together..
Haruko is a german folk singer-songwriter Susanne Stanglow whose debut album Wild Geese has become a good friend of mine. We’ve shared a lot of quality time together during the summer nights. When I’ve been walking around the sleeping city, Wild Geese have guided and guarded my path. When I’ve been reading a crime novel, Haruko’s beautiful phrasing have injected so much warmth into the characters that even the evil ones are ready to give up life of crime. When I’ve felt sad & stressed, Wild Geese have flown through the headphones, captured the emotions, made them stronger for a while before taking away the surface layer and revealing all the good stuff I failed to see.
Wild Geese is intimate and hauntingly beautiful. Even when you are taken into a fairytales it somehow manages to feel very personal. Eventhough I’ve never slept out underneath the stars and can’t build a fire to safe my life, Haruko brings the nature so close to my heart that suddenly becoming an outdoor type doesn’t seem like a bad option. It’s a very beautifully crafted folk album and eventhough these are home recordings, it sounds absolutely wonderful to me. A huge studio treatment couldn’t have made a significant improvement, but in a worst case it might have killed the down-to-earth warmness of the songs. There might be a lot of more high profile folk releases out there, but most of them will struggle to hold so much charming magic and fragile melancholic beauty inside them.
