Sweatmaster: Dig Up The Knife (Fullsteam, 2010)
Even pop and country blogs need a little bit of rock’n’roll every now and then and Sweatmaster is usually the best option for providing it. Dig Up The Knife is their fourth album and it takes them towards a little darker and heavier sounds, but thankfully there’s always more than enough room for melodies to keep these pop losers like myself interested. There’s actually quite a lot of pop choruses in the vein of the most rockin’ side of Sloan on the record.
Dig Up The Knife is certainly a little more versatile than the earlier albums and the first single Turnover is almost the only really typical Sweatmaster sing-a-long party anthem. The pace might get surprisingly slow at times, but my heart doesn’t rush into offside position, because they deliver inch perfect songs. Sasu Mykkänen is still the most convincing rock vocalist in the country and the song material is once again brilliant. Especially Some People Got Soul is an instant classic, but there’s obviously a bunch of great songs and Sweatmaster have created the best or the second best finnish album of the year so far (it’s a battle between Dig Up The Knife and A Cab To The City and it’s pretty hard to say which one is the most perfect). Well done.
