For some reason, the northern climes produce good indie music.  It isn't just damp places like the northeastern seaboard, Pacific Northwest, or United Kingdom, but even colder locales, such as the sources of two big ‘indie invasions’ (of America) of the last decade, Canada & Sweden.  In fact, Scandinavia as a whole has been making great strides - so perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that some of that has crossed the Baltic Sea to a nation like Estonia.  Situated just across the Bay of Finland from Helsinki, but also just west of St. Petersburg, no post-Soviet state, perhaps no post-communist state, has made more headway than the small nation, which is well on its way to be categorized with the wealthy Scandinavian countries, and no longer with ex-Soviet Republics on the Baltic, Latvia & Lithuania (it is the most northern of the three...).  Nationals Picnic likewise borrow and integrate Scando-synths and international indietronica on their debut, Winter Honey.

The airy opener "Too Fast" (one thing it is not...) is a good introduction to the band & the record, which has expansive pieces such as that, "Öko" and "Woke Me Up Yesterday", along with pieces that hew more towards indietronica in their beat, like "Who Do You Love?" and near-instrumental "Deltaplane".  Singer Marju Taukar's vocals get into heights that well match the synths.  And the band gets even better when they hew to the indie-pop sound that's made Sweden such a sensation (QRO's Swedish Sensations), bringing in their own enjoyable strum to "Shareware" and closer "Carrot Street".

Picnic experiment with a number of sounds on Winter Honey, but not all are as successful.  The band sort of randomly starts an alt-country twang and rhythm with "Fixed"; jarring, it's not bad, but rather basic to American ears that have been overwhelmed with the exploding genre these days.  And then there's the slow synth psychedelica of "Love Song For an Imaginary Lover" - though it's only four-plus minutes, it feels like it goes on forever.  Yet the band somehow squares this circle later on in "Two Worlds": its sitar-psych open makes one fear for "Love Song II", but then it goes into the background as indie-air is laid above it, and even matches to the rhythm-rhythm.

Taukar's vocals don't change a great deal on Winter Honey, and while that makes "Fixed" and "Love Song" even more off-putting, it's a strength for the rest of the record.  When Picnic sticks to sounds that would fit right in on the other side of the Baltic, the air is sweet.

MP3 Stream: "Shareware"