The English translation of Tero Ikäheimonen’s comprehensive Finnish black metal book, Pirunkehto – Suomalaisen black metallin tarina, is coming out September 15th on Svart Records with the English title The Devil’s Cradle. The book features interviews and career retrospectives of Beherit, Impaled Nazarene, and a bunch of other bands who do not count and have no reason to be in the same book as they suck and play crossover thrash with high-gain guitar pedals and RAC/oi themed pop-punk . These modern black ‘n’ roll bands aren’t even from the same era; they are just poseurs.
I wonder just how acid casualty the Cosmic Church interview will be? Will the book interview Desecresy and Serpent Ascending, the best of modern Finnish metal, or will it kowtow to the scenester black ‘n’ roll bar crowd? Probably the latter. Everyone knows that Beherit are the only Finnish black metal from way back when who really mattered. Impaled Nazarene were very good of course but no Beherit. This book will probably be funderground trash as based on the list below most of it will be fellating funderground bands bitching on about how they continue Beherit’s legacy despite Marko Laiho still being alive and kicking. We shall wait and see.
“The Devil’s Cradle: The Story of Finnish Black Metal” by Helsinki-based journalist Tero Ikäheimonen is a definite history of one of the most uncompromising and brutal music scenes in the world: the Finnish Black Metal.
Based on over 50 interviews done between 2014 and 2016, the book unravels the story from late 80’s to modern days featuring such bands as: Beherit, Impaled Nazarene, Barathrum, Archgoat, Azazel, Diaboli, Darkwoods My Betrothed, Horna, Vornat, Thy Serpent, Wanderer, Urn, Black Dawn, …And Oceans, Musta Surma, Alghazanth, Azaghal, Warloghe, Behexen, Clandestine Blaze, Satanic Warmaster, Ride for Revenge, Goatmoon, IC Rex, Charnel Winds, Cosmic Church, Saturnian Mist, Rienaus and Abyssion…
Beherit’s back catalogue would be a better buy than The Devil’s Cradle. Here’s At the Devil’s Studio 1990:
Tags: archgoat, beer metal, beherit, black 'n roll, Black Metal, book, cosmic church, Finland, Finnish Black Metal, goatmoon, Grindcore, horna, impaled nazarene, metal books, pop punk, poser metal, posers, poseurs, RAC, rac/oi, ride for revenge, satanic warmaster, svart, svart records, tero ikäheimonen, upcoming release
Warloghe interview could be cool and if you aren’t down with vornat then you’re lame. Also maybe clandestine blaze, ride for revenge (somewhat Beherit worship that is pretty good to me) and although poppy I still like em, Goatmoon.
Barathrum is kinda cool up to Legions of Perkele, anthemic and catchy, unlike those boring proto-war metal bands.
This book will suck and despite their claims to the contrary Impaled Nazarene sold out to the same crowd at the same time Entombed and all those other bands they “hate” did. Notice how their image changed to seem more “urban” to go along with the alleged crust/oi/hc/rock n roll “realness”, but it quickly becomes “headbanging and leather” once they play the stadium rock/metal card to cash in on the old “credibility” (the McWacken method), much like the trend bands they were “against” (except they went the extra mile and had the Children of Bodom guy help Ratt things up)… Only Beherit and Finnish death metal needs mentioning. Considering Svart did the Abhorrence and Demilich reissues, this is a waste of paper.
what about Belial and Black Crucifixion? you think of Belial as death metal?
Belial – Wisdom of Darkness was good but not legendary like Beherit was. Beherit are the Finnish black metal band!
While I agree you could say similar things about any region. Go to Norway, Darkthrone and Burzum are the only two real necessities. Go to Greece, Varathron and Rotting Christ (maybe Necromantia). Brazil, Sarcofago and Mystifier. Of course there are other good black metal bands from those regions but none that actually beat them out. My main point is the book might be more interesting if you want to understand all aspects of the region’s black metal. Although many of the bands are not so great now they may still reveal interesting info after being involved in the music at the time. Similar to how current Burzum does not interest me but Varg has made interesting statements about the music and those involved in recent videos. And as you know Berherit, the definitive Finnish black metal band is featured and I’m guessing will have a longer interview than most. Vornat and warloghe are considered classics to some especially with their demos
All of these guys are after Beherit though, unlike the Norwegian Gods.
That is true but still. As far as revered Finnish black metal bands go they hit the mark for the necessary bands. Only issue is there are many unnecessary included too. One problem I’ve had with Finnish black metal is besides Beherit and Impaled there wasn’t a very distinct sound. Too much worship of the Norwegians. Same with Sweden besides a few bands. South America has raw and dirty thrash sound. Greece has warm heavy metal. US has death metal traces and so on
Even blackened slavcore has a distinct sound. How could anyone confuse Graveland, or Nokturnal Mortum with something from Sweden, or America?
The problem is there is a distinct sound to the later bands. The war metal ones are basically just crossover thrash not black metal and the RAC bands are RAC, not black metal and not even metal. They have no reason to even be in a book about black metal and Beherit. That would be like including deathcore bands like The Black Dahlia Murder in a book about early American death metal bands like Morbid Angel, Possessed, Master, and Death. That’s exactly what is going on here with the Black Dahlia Murder equivalents taking up most of the book.
I agree, like I said they hit the mark on necessary bands but also included a lot of random shit
exactly, they can’t
Immortal, Emperor, and Mayhem (well Blackthorn) are all massively influential to everything afterwards too. It is impossible to discount the contributions of Blackthorn, Demonaz, and Samoth. Without Blackthorn, there is no black metal riffing style or compositional structure.
Brazil IS Sepultura . All those other Cogumelo bands are after Sepultura, including Sarcofago. The NWN! crowd just doesn’t like Sepultura as they were eventually commercially successful as they were the best and then took the chance to sell out to become actual rock stars when they were creatively spent. Sarcofago is influential but nothing like Sepultura is. The only band to actually have song structures similar to Sarcofago is Beherit but of course Beherit’s are less chromatic and hardcore influenced than both Sepultura and Sarcofago. Most of the “war metal” bands just copied Sarcofago’s aesthetic, not the actual music.
I agree about those bands’ influence but they don’t match up to best of Burzum or Darkthrone to me except maybe pure holocaust. Never been big on DMDS and I agree about Snorre importance but he was never really featured on any very important releases for Mayhem.
I agree about Sepultura, the only reason why I didn’t mention them is because when most think of black metal from Brazil they don’t consider early sepultura. Similar to how some don’t consider early sodom and just think of it as all thrash.
My main issue with current “war metal” is that most are just copying the sound of bands that came to their own sound through innovation and a natural mix of death/black/thrash when they were less defined subgenres and experimentation was occurring. Now you just have bestialholocaustblasphemowhatever band number 666 copying and mashing together Beherit, early Sodom, Blasphemy and so on. No original ideas and the bands will just say they’re “staying true” to an old sound which really means I can’t be creative or better than the old bands so I’ll just copy them
The “Metal-Archives” or “Reddit” or “mainstream metal media” genre is not what the bands actually played. Most of the current crop “war metal” bands are incapable of actually mashing together, actually copying those bands, or even just actually copying DRI or the Cro-Mags. They’re basically just shitty local hardcore bands who want to be Blasphemy and thing image and crappy production alone will make it so as they are losers. Comparing them to Sodom is a big stretch. Most of these “war metal” dudes are short, fat bald guys. You can tell they will suck just by looking at them. The Pete Helmkamp versus Pissgrave feud was hilarious a couple years ago.
Sacrofago sounds good (or at least interesting), however, Sepultera sucks, has always sucked and will always suck. Beneath the Remains was hyped pretty heavily at that time but I never liked it because it felt as if it was meant to have crowd appeal: Average a lot of popular bands, turn it up to 11 so that this seems original, and you end up with something almost everybody likes because it’s a bit like something he also liked and a bit different.
At this time, I had a good idea of Kreator and Sodom up to there and what I was looking for was something more in this direction: Faster and less regular than the Bay Area bands and their lookalikes, with less emphasis on what I nowadays know as shredding, and with less clean vocals. And Sepultera was the “hey, it’s not what you really want but goes a bit more in this direction and its Very Perfessionally Protuced™” band. Something I found at this time which was trashed in metal magazines I did actually like was Massacra.
IMHO, the issue with Sepultera was that ‘target: mainstream success’ project from very early on: And this amounts to taking a popular (semi-)underground (semi-overground?) style, and morphing this into something more familiar to conventional music listeners to whom it will then appear as new and original. If people want to do down this road, that’s (obviously) their prerogative but “Sepultera selling out” didn’t come as a surprise to me: That’s what they had been doing all the time.
NB: I’v consistently spelled this as Sepultera because Pantura is a similar phenomenon, at least to me.
Random Massacra link to go with that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVZQKmOpPKE
1990 concert video. Audio and video quality are “better than tolerable”, at least at the start. Can’t watch this completely as I have to do other stuff.
Black Crucifixion gets mentioned to me a lot when I’m listing the Finnish bands that matter, usually in the same breath as mediocre crap like Purtenance. I listened to a bunch of Purtenance when I was first getting into underground stuff, and liked them, but they didn’t really turn out to be something that sticks. Never listened to Black Crucifixion, are they any better?
Not really. They have like couple of decent songs. During the last few years and when they did some comeback shows they tried very hard to create themselves a legendary status but basically this band should just be forgotten.
Damn dude, why would they specialise so far down to just Finnish BLACK metal?
Couldn’t include Death metal? Get DEMILICH hello? And DEMIGOD? Rippikolu, yes Belial…
Finnish black metal is less obvious and less recognized, while old school Finnish death metal was a massive trend few years ago. It is now quite often considered to be better than Swedish death metal.
It’s not better, just smaller and less popular; there are less exemplary Finnish death metal albums than there are Swedish ones. The b and c listers are worse too: Grave > Convulse. Finnish death metal tropes just haven’t been incorporated into metalcore yet by idiots, just into random techdeaf, which is still technically metalcore as it is truly post-hardcore math rock rather than death metal.
The EP from Depravity is probably the best death metal EP ever produced. Metalcore is just further watered down Gothenburg power metal, I don`t see how its even relevant.
Most of this modern “speed metal” and “death metal” is just really metalcore musically, that is lamo later hardcore with metal aesthetics but none of the metal content. Finnish death metal hasn’t been raped this way yet like Gothenburg was and then the Stockholm sound was a decade later by metalcore groups like Tribulation, Repugnant, Horrendous and Nails. Some of these bands do not want to admit to being metalcore, but they are metalcore bands as they play metalcore. They are in fact the opposite of Entombed, who at first played death metal with crust aesthetics before selling out.
Yes, I didn’t mean that people are actually right on that matter.
Beherit was never really any good. But I wouldn’t mind seeing them in a book on the Finnish death metal scene, which was more original and had a better variety than their Scandinavian counterparts.
Beherit was awesome. Pay attention to what they are actually playing and the structure of it all. Or perhaps you prefer the sappy, sentimental songs in Disney movies and In Flames.
I actually can’t stand melodeath. I don’t mind listening to Beherit, its just that I don’t think they’re a very good band. I dig their style and originality but they fall short on proficiency and come off a bit dull. I get it that they’re going for a more raw approach but it just doesn’t cut it.
The Oath of Black Blood degenerates into noise sometimes mid-track but At the Devil’s Studio 1990 doesn’t.
I was looking for someone who could contribute 2 interesting metal related articles for my fanzine.