Stonefield of a Lifetime

Corporal Punishment sounds like a hardcore band-name. The Finnish Corporal Punishment is quite unusual doom. Actually the band-sound is closest to that of Norway's Funeral. You're letting yourself in for loping crushing riffs, and short blues-rock guitar breaks. The drumming is all big fat beats, accented by liberal bashings of china cymbals and ride cymbal bells. Lyrically it's all about pain, sorrow, self loathing, futility, and how that all builds into what we laughably call the human condition.

1997 was a weird year, and marked a turn to darkness we only caught up with during the fun and fulfilling Covid period. There's a touch of Amorphis and My Dying Bride to the songs on Stonefield of a Lifetime. The album title itself sums up the drudgery of human existence, pointless activities, uncertain meaning, wearing, grinding tedium.

Dead Skin echoes Paradise Lost in its riffs, melodies and gruff vocals. You can tell the 90s doom bands and melodeath bands that were in the band's influence list when doing pre-production on Stonefield of a Lifetime. This isn't a bad thing, and the Finnish-accented English is quite distinctive. The tempos are nearly all slow to middling, and once in every other song there might be a faster riff, and faster spat-out vocals, as on Dead Skin.

The mix is pretty full, and the guitar solos are characterful and unpolished. The bass is high in the mix and along with the drums steals the show instrumentally. The track Short Moments was released as single at the time and popped on MTV in late 1997 a few times. Yes, MTV used to feature doom metal bands from Finland, not to mention most forms of extreme metal, and as recently as late 1997. It meant a lot to watch this stuff on regular T.V. rather than just wank-clicking videos online.

Wrong Side is faster and has elements of Pantera-esque groove metal. Actually Corporal Punishment deliver doom with lashings of groove, and a tiny hint of melodeath, and despite the time of release things aren't really user-friendly on Stonefield... and there's no real gesture to nu-metal. The sound of this album is gruff, masculine, and really more like very thudding heavy pub-rock. Shake your bald patch, spill your cider, piss in the alleyway, and wear your sweaty Black Sabbath t-shirt to work the next morning.

Old Photos is clumsy and faster and enthusiastic, and sorrowful in a caveman way,

It seems to me that I had happy days of youth
But this total oblivion really drives me crazy
Those beautiful places, those smiling faces, nothing for me
I hate to see these photos, I can't remember anything

Just this moment

Memories, please come back
Memories don't leave me this way

If you've hit your mid-thirties and onwards, you'll know how the greatest grief is your own fading away. The big issues fuck off, but your own invisibility and the fragmentation of your own life story is the grimmest process. Doom is good at big picture stuff, but the bands who do the personal stuff are rarer. The faster drums and riffs at the end of Short Moments are really great, and if they had put more of the Short Moments elements into the album overall, it would've climbed into the excellent category from the quite good. The album gets better as it goes along and by the time Plus/Minus Zero turns up, it's like the guys finally found the sound they should have used all along. Oh well.

The main negatives about Stonefield of a Lifetime are the brusqueness of some songs, and the slightly confused mixing up of influences and musical styles. So the quirky Finnishness of proceedings is quite odd and fun, and the overall beer and jeans atmosphere of the production are strong positives. The 1997-ness is interesting also. It's a vibe.

If you want a really sincere, flawed, shout-along doom album, Stonefield... is pretty good. If the band had continued you suspect they might have made a really great early 00s album. But they didn't, sadly. In any event the harmonised riffs on Empty are catchy, and most people haven't heard the album, it's like being let in on a secret. Slightly over-looked albums are exciting in that discovery way.

Corporal Punishment started out playing Death Metal, sometimes thrashy, sometimes doomy but always pretty melodic. By the time they recorded their third (and last) album “Stonefield Of A Lifetime” they had become even more melodic. The sound on this album is certainly reminiscent of a lot of bands and yet no other band I know actually sounds like them. I would describe it as a slow version of a mixture of Paradise Lost’s “Shades Of God”/”Icon”, Lefay’s “The Seventh Seal” and a bit of Gorefest’s “Erase”.

Ali’s singing style had also become more melodic and although the change wasn’t big at all (imagine a clearer version of Jan-Chris De Koeijer or later David Vincent), it moved the band away from Death Metal to deathy Doom Metal.

“Stonefield Of A Lifetime” was their first (and only) release for Black Mark Production and suddenly the critics, who hadn’t predominantly been aware that this band even existed, unanimously praised it to the skies.

Although this album is pretty slow for the most part, there are also three up-tempo tracks to be found on here (“Wrong Side”, “Old Photos” and “Justificated?”), which add greatly to the diversity of this record. The only bad song on the album is the closer “+ - 0”, where the band experiments with electronic sounds and that doesn’t go well with the album and with the band.

When this album came out everyone predicted this band a glowing future. Sadly, they didn’t release anything afterwards and split up a few years later.

“Stonefield Of A Lifetime” contains 45 minutes of great and pretty unique Doom Metal, completed by a great production. So, if you are into any of the styles or bands I’ve mentioned in this review or into Scandinavian Metal of the 90’s in general then I’m pretty certain that this record would be enrichment for your collection.