The Rasmus
post from June 7, 2024
A couple of years ago, when my daughter started going to Finnish kindergarten, I occasionally heard a boy’s name - Rasmus. That sounded somewhat unusual and familiar to me. I even googled about the meaning and found, that in Scandinavian tradition this name means Beloved or Desired.
This case (and the fact that it was 2022, Finland had The Rasmus music band to present in Eurovision, their posters were everywhere) moved me to put them in my playlist for a while. Back then, The Rasmus revealed that they made huge progress, produced a number of songs, and polished their style. But remained a band of one hit for me personally. Probably, this again boils down to the times when I was a school kiddo, this band just appeared on the world stage and the radio played it everywhere. School memories are related to this music to me, In The Shadows of My Past…
Their history, however, looks like a role model for any good rock band. They started as friends at school, rehearsed a performance for Christmas in 1994, and right after that they noticed - every single disk out of the first 1000 batch was sold. One of their members left right in 1995, and some left later, but the founder (the guy with crow feathers in the weird haircut) Lauri Ylönen - is still in charge and sings!
In 1996 they signed up with Warner and stayed on top in Finland, Russia, and Estonia for a while. Around 2000 they met a new producer and redesigned the whole concept of a band, changed style a bi,t and worked hard, I need to say. It looked like they started from a blank page, worked a lot on songs before recording them, and made those recordings outside of Finland.
If you have not heard them at all - imagine some intriguing soft styled rock, with light additions of electronic sounds, mixed up with a deep, but soft voice. Singing about love and life suffering. Cherry on top is the front man with a stack of black hair, pierced with black crow feathers. That’s it. I can easily imagine myself as a teenager, thinking about the cruelty of life and total misunderstanding everywhere to the accompaniment of The Rasmus. Probably HIM could learn from The Rasmus to become a better band for teenagers.
I really like that the voice and musical parts are complimenting each other. I don’t feel the loneliness of the lead voice. When the verse starts - the melody and lead guitar heavily support, but do not hide the voice.
The only thing I don’t understand is why they never had a band member with the name Rasmus. Because it’s a real name. Imagine a band called Paul without Paul.