Murhaballadeja features a striking photo on the cover: Two beefy, big-jawed men with cruel eyes are in prison garb, shackled with heavy chains at the neck, wrists, knees and feet. Turns out they’re legendary 19th century murderers from Finland. These are the kinds of characters you’ll find in a collection of murder ballads from Kimmo Pohjonen.
Pohjonen is kind of a punk accordion renegade. He sports a mohawk, and his other projects mix accordion music with wrestling, or farm tools and animals. It’s all songs about murder, which he says are deeply embedded in Finnish culture: “There’s even a saying that if there was a wedding and three people were not killed, it wasn’t a good wedding.”
The Finns have a dark sense of humor, to say the least.
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