Lake Toba is the second album by Norwegian band Lukestar, who apparently are very much in vogue at the moment in their homeland. I went to Norway a few years ago, and absolutely loved it - it's a hell of a place. You know you're in an interesting country when the only graffitti you can find is protected by a sheet of plexiglass as a historical anti-Nazi relic from the Second World War. Norway's not necessarily the first Scandinavian country to pop into your head when you think of musical output (with the exception of a-ha) but that doesn't seem to faze Lukestar here - Lake Toba is a confident, emphatic album which appears to be named after a lake and supervolcano in Indonesia... for some reason.Opener "White Shade" opens innocuously enough, with a pretty conventional guitar and drums template joined by singer Truls Heggero's amazingly high-pitched voice - an instrument of pretty epic proportions which can be marked out as one of the band's most unique features. "Shape of Light" reminds me very strongly at times of early Bloc Party, with its angular guitars, huge chorus and ambitious indie rock feel. The next few songs continue in a very similar (and similarly enjoyable)Â vein. Which illustrates one of the album's problems - the songs have a almost hardcore punk ferocity and pace to them much of the time, but they're relatively long and when clumped together as on the album's first two thirds or so, they leave us gasping for a break. That break comes far too late in the form of "Intermission to Io" (a title which evokes the spacey feel of much of the album's music and artwork) which is just a minute-long instrumental breather - but it's too late, we're exhausted - all this makes listening to Lake Toba in one sitting quite a gruelling experience. We could have done with a little more variety and some more sensible sequencing here.Also slightly frustrating is how unclear the lyrics are, which I normally wouldn't mind but I'm buggered if I can find them on the internet anywhere, so I'm doing whatever the audio equivalent of squinting is (any ideas?) to try to figure out where Truls is on about. All this said, Lake Toba is a thoroughly enjoyable album. It often conveys an enormous sense of power, with its inventive drumming by Lasse Baklien and its mountainous, flaming guitars. The choruses on songs like the title track are enormously addictive and fun, forever rising up and down on intricate drum rolls and fills.Big, fiery and aggressive, Lake Toba is a bit of a volcano of an album. Whilst far from perfect (largely due to its repetitiveness), it is definitely worth looking into. 79%Lukestar on MySpace