Jan 092013
 

I’ve again gotten tired of “Seen and Heard” as the title for these round-up posts. I thought about using “Scene and Herd”, but decided that would give the wrong impression about the news and new music included in these posts, since the subjects are items that get me interested and often excited. So, for now at least, “Witnessed”. This round-up includes not only some things I’d like to share but also a blurb from DGR. Here we go:

OMNIUM GATHERUM

Sadistic bastards that we are, in December we published three different glowing reviews of Beyond, the forthcoming album by Finland’s Omnium Gatherum, despite the fact that the album won’t be released until late February in Europe and March 5 in the U.S. and we had no music we were authorized to stream from the album. Well, now we have music.

This morning Omnium Gatherum put up the song “New Dynamic” on YouTube.  Good choice: along with “The Sonic Sign”, it’s my favorite track on Beyond. Give it a listen and then let us know if you think we were being overly enthusiastic about what Omnium Gatherum has accomplished or if you agree that this shit is fantastic. Continue reading »

Dec 122010
 

If you’ve been keeping count, we’ve done Finland Tribute Week posts for 10 days in a row (including today) — and that’s not counting the two posts about Amorphis and Before the Dawn that started this tribute rolling before we decided to formalize it with a name. Either way, whether it’s been 10 days or 12, we’ve moved beyond the normal dictionary definition of “week”, at least if you live on Earth. There’s just too much awesome Finnish metal that we feel compelled to write about — and we’re still not done.

We’re not quite sure how much longer we’ll roll with this. We’re not even sure what day it is. But based on what we’ve got up our sleeves at the moment, it will last about three more days (interspersed with a couple of guest contributions). Even then, we’re positive we’ll have left out bands that are near and dear to the hearts of many of you.

Yes, Finland’s a small country, but it’s still a fucking country, and there’s just no way we can do complete justice to all the metal it’s producing, even if we continued this series into the New Year. Plus, lots of things have been happening in the wider world of metal while we’ve been tunnel-visioned with Finland, and we need to get back to that wider world.

But not today. Today, we’re going to play our MISCELLANY game with Finnish metal. As regular readers know, in our usual MISCELLANY posts, I randomly pick bands I’ve never heard before, I listen to a song (or two) of their music, and I make a log of the journey for this site — usually not knowing in advance what the music will sound like or whether it will be appealing or disappointing.

For this Finnish edition of MISCELLANY, I’ve randomly picked five — yes, five — bands from the list of reader suggestions we’ve gotten since this Tribute began. These are bands whose music I’d never heard before. In fact, these are bands whose names I’d never heard before: Ikuinen Kaamos, Hateform, Flame, Crystalic, and Cause For Effect.

And, sure enough, the music tends to validate our hypothesis that there’s some mutating substance in the Finnish water supply that turns a high percentage of Finnish children into hot-shit musicians, because this was one wild ride, from start to finn-ish. (for reactions to the music, and the tracks I heard, read on after the jump . . .) Continue reading »