Every now and again there comes an album which manages to reaffirm your hope in humanity. There’s a certain kind of magic around such an album that is impossible to explain and impossible to quantify, and yet you must endeavor to, because you want others to experience the same joy that you did.  Ooberman’s Hey Petrunko is one of these albums.

Ooberman has already earned their marks as one of the most inventive and interesting bands playing today, and this latest effort solidly builds upon that foundation.  The first thing that strikes you upon listening is its undeniable loveliness.  It’s an album that is like an audio crystal vase; sparkling and exquisite, seemingly delicate but with a hidden strength.  Despite Hey Petrunko’s beauty, this is not nicey-nice, easy-listening music. These aren’t coffee-table songs to give to your auntie for a Christmas present.

It is, in fact, an album that manages to be many difficult and different things at once.  It is an amalgamation of contradictory sounds and traditions, which shouldn’t work and yet does so splendidly.  Hey Petrunko manages to sound refreshing and new, and instantly familiar and comforting.  The only conclusion that can be made is that Ooberman has tapped into the deep resource of timeless, organic music; the music that we are each born with inside our cells.  It is the music that is of part of everyone, that is fundamental to our beings, but that is nearly impossible to reach.

There is not a single wrong step on the album, but I do have some favourite moments.  “Bluebell Morning” is an ultimately moshing number of the variety that is perfect to play for waking-up motivation in the morning.  “Hand That Gets Burned” is an elegiac ode to that bad relationship we’ve all had.

“First Day of the Holidays” is an epic if ever there was one.  It’s Proustian in its scope, opening up on seas of melancholy, regret, and remembrance.  At times it is head-bopping and danceable, at others distant and dainty, and at still others absolutely hard-rocking and thrashing.  The song manages to perfectly, in a few brief minutes, encapsulate the feeling of a memory; the same feeling, which took Marcel Proust six rather long volumes to do.  It is simply a great song.

Although we have just reached the end of March, I’m going to stake my claim early: Hey Petrunko is one of the finest album releases of this year. If you are a member of the increasingly small fraternity who actually likes good music, you have to get your hands on a copy of Ooberman’s Hey Petrunko immediately.  You won’t regret it.