Finland’s Color Dolor haven’t been regular visitors to NMR but then the duo do have other projects, notably Stina Koistinen, with her solo project Stinako, an EP collaboration with Astrid Swan last year and so on.
However, I did meet her at the By: Larm festival in Oslo back in February where she was a contender for the Hyundai Nordic Music Prize for best album of the year. Perhaps it’s time for a reminder of what we are missing?
It seems that they are working on new Color Dolor music, but haven't released any new stuff yet and an album won't be out until next spring at some point. She said, “It has been a strange time to work on music, we have basically done a bunch of songs during the last year and now redoing most of it. Sometimes it takes a few rounds to get it proper!”
So to fill in the gap here is a (pretty recent) Memory Lane excursion for the song 'Running in the Dark' from their third and most recent album, the Teosto prizewinning ‘LOVE’ (2018). This Juha Ilmari Laine directed video, in its candle-lit glory, was originally released on the 19th September 2018.
Before writing this I looked back to 2015 and the first time I ever reviewed Color Dolor, a track called ‘The Angel’ from their 2013 debut album ‘Cuckoo in a Clock’, when I knew little of Nordic music generally and thought every band in Finland was a clone of Eurovision-winning thrash metal-ers Lordi.
I noted then that Color Dolor already had a reputation, having opened for St Vincent in Helsinki and for the Norwegian superstar Susanne Sundfør, that the band didn’t copy any style, they were pretty well unique from what I heard and saw and that every song was different. Also that the Nordic countries’ leading newspaper had described them as ‘future megastars.’
But mainly what I couldn’t avoid was the quality of Koistinen’s voice. Five years on, nothing has changed. It is still gorgeous.
I’m going to indulge myself here as well, by including the video for‘The Angel’so I can have my own Memory Lane trip.
As far as I’m aware they don’t usually tour here, restricting themselves to Finland and the Scandinavian countries where they have quite a following and attract big audiences, also the Baltic countries and over the border in Russia. They were also sidelined for a while by illness, the same one Stina Koistinen refers to on the Swan/Koistinen EP mentioned earlier. Hopefully, things will change next year and once the new album is out. Friends tell me they have a great live show.