What would be the normal response if you had a surprise indie hit album that was spectacularly lo-fi, very left-field, and sounded like it was being broadcast from a separate dimension? Try to reproduce the same sound, Arcade Fire style? Use the proceeds in money and credibility from that debut to produce a glossy, overproduced second album? Or throw the rulebook out the window, and produce an album that's even rawer, even stranger, and even more out of this world than the first? Given Paavoharju's sound, it's perhaps no surprise that they have opted for option number three.

"Laulu Laakson Kukista", the band's second album, is even more crackly, warped, and fuzzy than their first effort. As before, the music is a combination of soundscapes, electronic sounds, and classical musical instruments such as harpsichords and flutes, but this time it's all under another layer of otherworldly signal processing, as if this one was beamed in from some other reality even more exotic than the last one was.

Kevätrumpu, for instance, merges fragments of a trashy Europop beat with glockenspiels, icy female vocals, and moments where the song itself disappears into a fog of static, only to re-emerge later like an aeroplane emerging from a cloud. It sounds like a Eurovision entry from an alternative universe, and I mean that in the best possible way (and given Finland's success with Lordi, perhaps they should consider entering this song in next year's Eurovision just for kicks).

On the other side of the stylistic ledger, Italialaisella Laivalla is the closest thing that the band has ever done to a straight-out ballad, built mainly around a gently strummed acoustic guitar and without the blurry and fuzzy sound that this band is normally noted for. Even though it's the only song on the album that's explicitly like this, it does demonstrate that the band are capable of something other than introducing bucketloads of tape hiss into the master tapes of their recordings.

There is also a lot of more typical Paavoharju here, such as the seemingly unconnected melodies of Kirkonväki, the bassy jungle march on Uskallan and the sunny guitar pop of Tyttö Tanssii, just to keep fans of the first album happy. While it doesn't quite flow together as well as the first album did, it's still cohesive and bizarre enough to be a riveting listening experience.

Paavoharju are a band that not everybody is going to like, and their frequently bizarre excursions into odd and strange musical territories mean that this is not an album that can be casually appreciated; it requires careful attention to get the full benefit out of it. Despite this though, this is intelligent, thoughtful music that is very well put together, and utterly unlike pretty much anything else that you're likely to hear this year.