Dec 142010
 

We’ve learned a thing or two about Finnish metal in the course of writing this series. For example, we learned about two home-grown bands who were especially influential in the progression of metal in Finland, even though they are no longer active: Sentenced and Stone. Those are two of the bands we’re focusing on today. (In other words, it’s time for all Finnish metal nerds to geek out.) The third is a somewhat more recent player in the scene that your NCS co-authors really, really like: Omnium Gatherum. (We are not geeks — at least not all the time.)

SENTENCED

Sentenced released their debut album in 1991. In the decade and a half, or thereabouts, that followed, the band produced seven more albums before announcing in 2005 that The Funeral Album would be their last. They played their final show on October 1, 2005, in Oulu, and the concert was filmed and later released on DVD under the title Buried Alive.

Guitarist and founding member Miika Tenkula died less than three years later, his premature death brought on by a congenital heart condition. The surviving members of Sentenced have continued their careers in other bands, including Poisonblack, KYPCK, and The Man-Eating Tree.

Particularly in their earlier years, Sentenced played an important role in the creation of melodic death metal, paving the way for bands like Children of Bodom by conjoining death-metal aggression with irresistible melodic (and often melancholy) passages. And yet, many people would say (and have said) that their 1995 album Amok is the band’s crowning achievement, and it’s debatable whether “melodic death metal” is a fitting label for it.

(more after the jump . . .)

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Nov 192010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we have yet another guest post by ElvisShotJFK — this one being the second installment in a series he created in his last post.]

Don’t you hate it when you hear a good song but don’t know who’s it’s by? Sometimes it’s more frustrating when the song is a cover and you can’t figure out who’s actually playing it. The more obscure the song or band, the harder it is to figure out where to look. Even with the wealth of knowledge to be found online these days, Napster Syndrome is alive and well, making some songs difficult to accurately track down. People still get it wrong, no matter how many times someone who knows what they’re talking about says something.

Like Cradle Of Filth (who I mentioned earlier in Volume 1), Children Of Bodom have recorded several covers over their career, going so far as to release an album’s worth of covers, some of them recorded specifically for the album. Not only that, but they used midgets to help promote the album.


Heavy metal midgets. Awesome.

Where was I? Oh yeah . . . even though they’ve done a fair amount of covers, there are songs that have been credited to them that were actually done by other bands.

Let’s get Blooddrunk and dive right in . . . Continue reading »