Estonians rock?

There was a time, once, when I thought absolutely nothing good could ever come out of the republic of Estonia (except, of course, Brandon Fraser via Encino Man which also starred a young, de-hobbitized Samwise Gamgee, but I digress...).

That is no longer the case thanks to Opium Flirt.

Several years ago, I downloaded the title track from Opium Flirt's first album "Saint European King Days" and thought it was pretty good (I found it on the very decent music blog "said the gramophone"). So I saved it along with the rest of the mp3s that I download weekly from the internets. As often happens, these single track downloads get lost in that sea of mp3s that fill up my hard drive. And because I've got my itunes playlists set so that I only listen to music that I haven't heard in the past 6 months, it was at least a year or two after I downloaded it that this Opium Flirt track pleased my ears again.

But upon a second listen I became mesmerized. Opium Flirt's "saint European King Days" is a hauntingly wonderful song. So I checked out some more songs by the band and discovered that they are all over the place (in terms of style). This is a sure plus for any band, in my book. You might be able to categorize Opium Flirt as "ambient psychedelic", but then you'd only be accurately describing about half of their songs.

Anyway, I highly recommend taking a listen. Three words of warning:

1. listen to the whole song and not just the intro (their intro's are often long and can be monotonous)
   
2. listen to more than one track
3. the song "Saint European King Days" would make me want to cry, if I wasn't such a manly masculine man

More from Opium Flirt here.