Time for a little random palate cleanser thrown in the middle of the usual proceedings. I only own one album from the Finnish singer/songwriter Aino Venna and it's courtesy of my dad who randomly bought it for me at the time of release. And my history with it is, well... evident in the review really which is a half-anecdotal journey into my opinions at the time of release vs what I think now, years later, when I've actually started listening to it more.

This is an album that my dad got for me as a present the year it was released. Even though we've both been musically inclined in our lives, my dad very rarely gives me music or music-related things - and when he does, it tends to be something completely unpredictable. He never went into detail why he thought to buy this for me; as far as I know from what he said, it's solely because he read a review of the album and then decided to get it for me on a whim (I don't think he had even heard a single note of the actual music at that point). Aino Venna is a Finnish singer/songwriter and Marlene was her debut album, and its mixture of smoke-covered blues, chanson and old-fashioned folk evidently stood out quite strongly in the Finnish music industry, garnering positive reviews at the time. It was, however, absolutely nothing that I was in the mood for in 2012 and I bounced right off it during my initial listens, and it quickly got more or less buried at the bottom end of my CD shelf where it alphabetically was determined to reside. It took me literal years to even add it to my collection on RateYourMusic because I simply forgot about it for so long, and it's not until over a decade later when I actually began to listen to this instead of relying on the vague memories of those unimpressed first spins.

Full review up at my website and on the aforementioned RYM.