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Imagine a rockin' band playing a Bar Mitzvah, with a head-banging trombonist and a heavy metal cellist. Throw in some eastern musical influences. Now imagine that they can turn on a dime and suddenly be playing music that would make a sailor cry in his beer. That should give you some idea of what Vasaraasia sounds like. Great stuff. I picked this CD up at ProgDay the year Höyry-Kone played (the two bands are made up of mostly the same musicians). When the band Discus arrived at the airport, I was with the crew that went to pick them up. On the way back to the hotel, I put this CD on - the guys in Discus loved it and kept asking for it to be turned up. So there's another vote in favor. After the ProgDay performance, Höyry-Kone played Orion studios in Baltimore, and since all the members of Alamaailman Vasarat were present, they played too. Höyry-Kone had blown me away at ProgDay, and amazingly Alamaailman at Orion was even better. I was pleasantly surprised when the band was announced to play this year's NEARFest, and I think a lot of people are going to be even more pleasantly surprised by their performance. review by Bob Eichler — 4-5-03 —

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Vasaraasia is a lot of fun. It's like a postmodern pastiche of all sorts of folk musics, thrown together with some seriously heavy rock tendencies. Immediately obvious are the klezmer influences, which are accentuated by the instrumentation of choice - cello, trombone, soprano sax. But it's very often played at hyperspeed with lots of distortion, which makes things really interesting. The pieces here range from the frenetic klezmer-metal opener to slower compositions where the cello and trombone take the lead with long, slow, brooding lines. A couple notable pieces feature what sounds like a heavily distorted guitar, playing metal-like crunchy rhythm lines; but no guitar is credited in the liner notes. From seeing live shows, I now know that it's actually an acoustic cello, closely miked and run through a shitload of electronics! Why one would want to make a cello sound exactly like a distorted electric guitar is beyond me, but hey - it's a pretty cool novelty effect. In short, take a lot of folk influences (Scandinavian, Iberian, and Middle Eastern are all quoted on the band's website) and mix in a healthy dose of Höyry-koneish wackiness, and this is what you get: a chaotic, unpredictable, and utterly brilliant album. Truly schizophrenic, Vasaraasia bounces gleefully between the manically upbeat and the oppressively droney. Great prog with a great sense of humor. review by Brandon Wu — 11-19-02 —