Impaled Nazarene - Suomi Finland Perkele
Review: This is a faster style of the musical fascism that made Ugra-Karma beautiful balanced with a Venom-inspired slow heavy rock alternation that lends melancholy and fatalism to the album, which suffers from a lack of inspiration and direction found on previous albums.
"Suomi Finland Perkele" sounds like a side project album; all of the songs are blastingly halted, and are differentiated well, yet use very similar offhand ideas which are seemingly undesigned as a contiguous listening experience. Often riffs are rigid counterparts to a chanting rhythmic vocal, holding place and expectation like a rock band in an off-the-cuff motion. In that, and in its pentatonic structures, this album represents the meaningless dark rock side to black metal that merges psychedelic and gothic rock into a suicide cult of extreme receptive nihilism.
When blasting, the riffs are lazily dependent upon tonal expectancy through standard rock chord progressions, and when not, they are rambling minor-key waffling like Venom meets Lynyrd Skynyrd. But most commonly, the blasting occurs in staggered spurts of frustration - a form akin to the thunderous bounce-metal of Exhorder or the jarring offsets of Meshuggah - but executed with a less rock-like expectancy and more of a mechanistic, industrial delivery.
This album changes direction from the last release, being less straight-forward speed and provocation and more melodic and conventional song structure. Songwriting is not improficient and should be less boring with the advancements in style, but it loses the beauty of what Impaled Nazarene had, which was a real powerhouse of simple black metal emotion.