Suomi Finland Perkele

It seems I have gotten back into writing album reviews on here quite a bit this past week and I've pretty much been reviewing whatever I want, which is what I've always done anyway. No care in the world what anyone thinks. I just give my thoughts and opinions on the music I write about. Impaled Nazarene is a fairly good black metal band from Finland and they've been at it for quite awhile now, since around 1990, and are one of the most senior bands in this genre from Finland. Aside from this album "Suomi Finland Perkele", "Nihil" which features Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom fame on guitars, and "Pro Patria Finlandia", I am not too educated or familiar with Impaled Nazarene. I feel like they're a solid band from these recordings and this 1994 release is the best of the three. Not bad, not amazing, but definitely good and solid.

Black metal is definitely the genre tag that best suits this album's sound although there are certainly other influences going on throughout the album's short half-hour duration. It seems to mostly be a mix of black metal and punk rock with some thrash/speed metal sporadically sprinkled around for some good measure. I do wish there was a bit more variety here and there but the music is competent enough to get by without much of it. "Blood Is Thicker than Water" is probably my finest track on the album and it's played at a slower to a mid-paced tempo. The riff is very catchy and rocking and contrasts with the following track "Steelvagina" which is a full on black metal assault, containing one of the best fast riffs on the album. "Let's Fucking Die" is a fast song with a thrashy speed metal vibe that contains a neat yet very simple guitar solo. Actually, this song sounds a lot like Venom.

Melody can be found here in some forms such as the aforementioned "Blood Is Thicker than Water", "Total War - Winter War" to an extent, which seems to be one of the band's more well-known anthems, and especially "Quasb / The Burning". The final of these three tracks is the slowest, most foreboding song here and really works a bit of a doom metal influence. It's a nice break from the near constant blasting of this album. Also, there is a bit of a grindcore influence with the track "Kuolema kaikille (paitsi meille)". It's easy to assume that anyway due to the song's sub 1-minute runtime and it's literally 50 seconds of extreme speed and brutality. These songs mostly are on the shorter side with the longest being the previously mentioned doom-esque "Quasb / The Burning" followed by the album's closing track "The Oath of the Goat", which is only mere seconds shorter. This actually works quite well as the closing track and contains some of the album's finest riff work. Unfortunately, these short run times and grindcore influences do drag my score of the album down by a bit because I feel that some of these songs could stand to have some slower segments, more musical ideas, and some more soloing. Plenty of albums get their point across in 30 minutes but this thing, for the most part, feels suffocated and there aren't enough musical ideas to allow for a better-structured album.

So yes, this is a solid album and I definitely enjoy it for the most part whenever I decide to listen to it. I just feel it is sealed far too deep within itself and could benefit from leaner songwriting and more interesting musical concoctions. The drums, aside from the all too rare moments when the music slows down, are played in the same blasting style that gets tiring after too many tracks. Despite this, I beleive this to be the finest of what I've heard from Impaled Nazarene, and "Blood Is Thicker than Water" is too good of a song to not be enjoyed!

An early peak is a double-edged sword: on one hand the band can bathe in critical and commercial success establishing themselves as a potent force on the field; on the other hand, every subsequent release will be compared to the magnum opus, and it would be made to look as an afterthought its merits very often overlooked and underappreciated. Of all the future offerings the immediate follow-up always has the heaviest cross to bear unless it’s an entirely new path taken… in the case of the album reviewed here there’s no new direction, the band follow the road carved by the grandiose “Ugra Karma”. I guess Mika Luttinen and Co. were well aware that to beat the “Karma” would be nearly impossible, but they still try to sound as relevant and brutally spaced-out as possible.

The short 1-min intro is an imposing dramatic battle instigator setting the scene for the invasion of “Multihuipennis” which rages hard with all the blasting vigour the band can muster, а possible leftover from its predecessor, 2.5-min of pure unbridled fury. A huge surprise awaits the listener, “Blood is Thicker Than Water”, the most contrasting cut imaginable to the hyper-active opener, a glorious epic doomster, arguably the finest song the band ever composed, with even Luttinen’s unholy shouts taking “a fall” towards more acceptable parametres. An absolute stunner which elevates the level much higher, and is quickly superseded by “Steelvagina”, another super-fast racer with a few more stylish embellishments the guys unleashing hell to match every horde from the rampant at the time Norwegian movement. The belligerent shouts at the beginning of “Total War-Winter War” bode untapped aggression, but the delivery is more on the playful black/crossover side with more dramatic build-ups, the band both remorseless as always and more serious on occasion. “The Burning” is a great officiant black/doomster which lacks the energetic leaps and bounds of the earlier mentioned highlight, but is a deeply atmospheric composition which brings a lot of funereal lustre to the proceedings.

“Kuolema Kaikille” is one min of unrestrained brutality bordering on grindcore, and since two in a row would have been too hard to bear arrives “Let’s Fucking Die”, a frolic thrash/crossover cut with uplifting merry rhythms. “Genocide” returns to the more brutal ways of execution the guys bashing with vigour calming down a bit for the melo-black/deathster “Ghettoblaster” which marginally mellower nature serves well to inaugurate the coming of “The Oath of the Goat”, an epic black metal odyssey with more dramatic accumulations lasting for over 4-min.; an unexpectedly academic finale to this otherwise fairly immediate opus.

The magnanimous gravity of “Ugra Karma” can’t be felt for most of the time as the cyber-black metal grandeur of that album is really hard to repeat, but the band do their best to sound relevant and up-to-date, and to tell the truth this effort isn’t such a big step back with admirable attempts at diversity which some may have taken as new trajectories sketched, to be explored in the future. Well, epic doomy hymns of the kind were destined to remain as “side-dishes” served on more or less regular bases throughout the band’s career which continued unabated after the opus here, and is on full-throttle up to this day. In fact, the album reviewed here served a template that the guys have been following steadfastly for over twenty years now, sometimes trying to touch their Karmic masterpiece. Luttinen and his ever-reliant team have no reasons whatsoever to worry about their voluminous discography; they’ve been doing really well raising the flag of Finnish metal all the way from Heaven to Kingdom Come.

I confess. It's an utterly peaceful and extremely intelligent headline, but I don't have the copyright. Shame on me, it is adopted from a statement of Mika Luttinen from 1993. Well, the full-length of this year, "Ugra Karma", really developed an enormous power that could be compared with that of a nuclear strike, but "Suomi Finland Perkele" was an attack with a poorly adjusted air gun at best.

The here reviewed failure has almost nothing in common with its outstanding predecessor. Yes, there are a few numbers that stand stylistically in the tradition of "Ugra Karma", but in terms of quality, they cannot hold a candle to its songs. "Vitutuksen multihuipennus", for instance, is a flat speed song, dense, but equipped with more or less miserable guitar lines. The only thrilling detail of this tune is its title, a real tongue twister. Whenever I try to say these two words, it sounds like "we two took that multi penis", but that's another (nonsensical) story. Speaking of penises, the "Steelvagina" is not far, but it is nothing else but another faceless high speed track that does not trigger any reaction. I just sit there, do not even shrug my shoulders, but only wait for better songs.

Yet "Suomi Finland Perkele" is skimping on great tracks. "Blood Is Thicker than Water" surprises with a profound melody line and evokes a melancholic feeling, but it has nothing to do with those sometimes chaotic, sometimes well structured, but always relentless attacks of the first two albums. Credit is due to the band for avoiding commercial cheesiness. Nevertheless, this is not really the kind of music that I want to hear when listening to an Impaled Nazarene album, because the roughshod attitude is missing. "Total War - Winter War" is closer to the former outbursts, but it suffers from its both overlong and stupid intro. However, even the pretty good tunes bring one thing to light. "Suomi Finland Perkele" lacks of coherence. The group offers a stylistic mishmash - and downers like the viscous and boring "Quasb / The Burning" or the boozy "Let's F**king Die" are just useless. The latter crosses the border to punk and black' n roll, but this approach does not make sense at all. Despite its simplicity, it is confusing in the context of the band's previous outputs. However, all these disappointing tracks go hand in hand with the mediocre performance of Mika Lutinnen. The guy has seemingly forgotten that he is brilliant whenever his voice conveys an insane touch, but it does not work very well in any other case.

After the game is already lost, "Genocide" recalls the density, pressure and vigour of "Ugra Karma" and the remaining two songs achieve at least a solid level. Too late, too little. Impaled Nazarene seemed to be on the way to create their own niche, "hysteric cyber black metal" or something like that, but instead of sharpening their profile, they decided to play the clowns. I still wonder why they did not reap what they had sown. Okay, "Suomi Finland Perkele" is not the worst album of all times and despite a significant lack of atmosphere, its production is acceptable. Yet this does not mean that it is able to keep its head above water. Hence it follows that this work is rather nothing than an atomic war.

Just after one year from the hyper violent Ugra-Karma, these Finnish crazy motherfuckers Impaled Nazarene, are back in anger with another album that would have remained in history for the brutality and the sheer rawness of a band that never accepted any form of compromise and always conserved a mocking but shocking attitude. Once again, the hilarious components are heavily present also in this new album, starting from the title and passing through the songs on it.

Everything is made to be violent but also a way to laugh back at those too serious and satanic black metal bands that were taking dominion on several zones of the world at the time. Already from the incredibly strange, martial and cold intro we can notice that the band hasn’t move away from the original sound of the previous efforts and “Vitutuksen Multihuipennus” is ready to welcome us to hell. The raw, semi blast beats remind the ones on the debut and everything sounds far rawer than the predecessor. By the way, if you listen carefully, we can find some more melodic riffs and that is the turning point for this band.

From now on, these riffs will grow in number and this album is just a way between the old Impaled Nazarene period and the new one. “Blood Is Thicker than Water” is another example of what I said: the riffs have even something epic inside and the speed is less present. Mika is always great at the vocals but in some parts he’s less schizophrenic and there’s a stronger will in considering more the form of the song. In these tracks the rawness of the first years is filtrated through the bigger burden of technique of the recent years and also the punk/black assaults are a bit more controlled.

In tracks like “Steelvagina” and “Ghettoblaster” the raw attitude survives and the instruments are just relentless. Before I forgot, a special credit should be given to the bass sound: it’s always like a panzer with the dry-out, blasting production, ready to support everything with its metaphorical “large shoulders”. During the most impulsive tracks, the band changes of skin and it’s again ready to show its supremacy with essential, open-chords riffs and blasting vocals. “Total War - Winter War” is another classic in their set list: the martial drums rolls at the beginning are soon washed away by more savage black/punk riffs.

“Quasb / The Burning” has more of those doom/ritual atmospheres we could find in Ugra-Karma with keyboards too. This time we can find more “melodic” hints in the riffs. “Kuolema Kaikille (Paitsi Meille)” is the heaviest and surely the most evident return to old brutality being a 50 seconds blast beats song. It’s fucking good. “Let’s Fucking Die” has lots of influences from Venom in the tempo and the riffs while can find even a guitar solo! “Genocide” is a return to more melodic and sad riffage before the brutal explosion with up tempo parts and more brutal sections.

“The Oath of the Goat” is a more mid-paced and atmospheric track. It shows quite different and new types of riffs by the guitars and this is another point of evidence about the Impaled Nazarene’s will to change a bit from the past. One thing is for sure, they did it very well with this album. Ugra-Karma remains unmatched for intensity and pure brutality but this Suomi Finland Perkele will forever be remembered for the first innovation by this great band.

Suomi Finland Perkele is one of those albums that should carry an advisory label... "WARNING: excessive headbanging and potential neck damage may result from use of this album". Come on man... "Let's Fucking Die!", "Total War/Winter War", Ghetto Blaster". Black metal with speed metal riffs and old school punk intensity, Suomi Finland Perkele indeed.

A word about Impaled Nazarene's really early shit: it's horrible. After my initial love affair with the band I downloaded much of their first album, and most of it barely qualifies as music. I mean, it's just really really bad. The song titles (SADOGOAT!) are hilarious, but in the end noise is noise.

SFP is the black metal album a guy who HATES black metal can get into. Vithulguhagun Mulitpennuissn is pretty grim, what with the incessant black beats, but those riffs are fucking CATCHY. Ditto LFD (a retread of Venom's Angel Dust)... Winter War is the classic though... a pretty hilarious intro (remember that SNL dog show skit?), and BAM, monster riff after monster riff.

"the Quaasb/burning" is a bit tedious, but pretty rewarding. Motorhead + Darkthrone = Impaled Nazarene. I love Impaled Nazarene. You should too.