(As of late our writer DGR has been leaning into melodic death metal, and that tilted him into the new album by Finland’s Thy Kingdom Will Burn, released in January by Scarlet Records.)

Any long-standing musical genre will develop its own regional flavorings over time. Many of them are echoes of the first handful of groups to break through in that particular style, later to become ingrained in the blood of any following acts. The tower of influences effectively comes crashing down to be compacted into a simple statement ‘this is recognizable as having come from…’ and so on.

This is how people end up specializing in styles from certain countries, and with a practiced ear and enough familiarity, you can conjure the basic tenets of a certain region simply by seeing it referenced in front of a genre listing. Some are way more prominent than others and those that fly under the metal detection sphere instead feel like an undercurrent and noticeable pattern.

Finland has been a fun country in this respect because the one genre they truly seem to dominate is the folk-metal and folk-song-inspired genre-sphere. There’s a plethora of groups all specializing in music that sways with the rhythm of drinking songs and veers hard on the edge of feeling like an extreme take on power-metal’s sugar-laden hooks. Were Finland to wear crowns, that would be one of a scant handful teetering precariously upon its head.

No shock then, that many of those melodic sensibilities – and even particular recognizable motifs – seem to have bled through into the country’s other musical aspirations, including what seems to be a recent revitilization of its melodeath sphere. Continue reading »