Member of Immortal Damnation

The history of the Finnish Purtenance is so interesting (or uninteresting - depending on how you look at it) that in its most iconic period this band existed only three years, of which the first two of them functioned as Purtenance Avulsion, and during this short time they managed to record only two demos. Finally, in 1991, the Finns changed to the known band name and the line-up of Harri Saro (drums), Toni Honkala (bass), Juha Rannikko (guitar) and Timo Häyrinen (vocals) first hit with a minor release announcing the album entitled "Crown Waits The Immortal", and a year later in a slightly expanded group (a new bass player, Pasi, joined the group, while Toni Honkala jumped to the second guitar) officially debuted with the longplay "Member Of Immortal Damnation". An album that next to Demigod, Funebre, Convulse and Abhorrence perfectly showed how murky death metal with a cold Scandinavian climate should look like.

"Member Of Immortal Damnation" therefore focuses at raw sounds, but also those not devoid of heaviness, some clarity, icy melodiousness and deathy atmosphere. You may like the grinding in medium tempos, solo parts (reminiscent of the way of creating tearful melodies a la...Greg Mackintosh!), the mentioned, overwhelming atmosphere, concrete growling (sometimes also grunts) or generally a high degree of differentiation, despite turning into strictly underground sounds (and conditions - I refer to quasi-demo production). And so, the band can perfectly move from simpler or more atmospheric motifs to those with blasting in one song, and at the same time not lose its naturalness or coherence. Examples include "A Dark Cloud Arises", "Black Vision", "The Lost Memories", "In The Misty Morning" and "Deep Blue Darkness". On "Member..." there is basically only one thing that is quite easy to eliminate (or rather ignore): intros. And while the opening one fits the whole, "Lacus Somniorum" and "John 3:16" break the coherence of the disc and do not bring anything meaningful beyond the acoustic/synth ambient. It's definitely better to skip them and focus on the proper, death metal side of the album.

Therefore, despite a very short activity in the early 1990s, the Finnish Purtenance managed to debut with a bang. It's true that at the time of its premiere, "Member Of Immortal Damnation" was not given a huge cult among other Finnish gems (even compared to the later "Nespithe" or "Psychostasia"), but it had its impact on the development of the local scene. Momentary, but very important.

Originally on A bit of subjectivism...in metal

I'm not exactly sure how many times I have, in some fashion, made nods to Finnish death metal in my reviews so far, but I'm aware that I do it pretty often. The Finnish scene's early output is fascinating for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one might be that it comes off as a "culmination" of the cutting-edge extremity heard at the end of the 80's. A lot of the country's most influential efforts could only have come from Finland, but previous entries in the death metal and grindcore genres from the American and especially the British bands were definitely the direct inspiration for this monumentally bizarre style. Abhorrence from Helsinki were one of the first to bring death metal to the far reaches of Scandinavia, but Nokia's Purtenance (Avulsion) were pretty damn early to the show as well. The demo material of both bands are, for all intents and purposes, relevant listening for anyone interested in early deathgrind, but the Nokia band was not quite as deadly as Abhorrence was with Vulgar Necrolatry. In 1991, however, Purtenance realized their potential on the Crown Waits the Immortal EP, which is definitely their best release despite being very brief. Two essential, scene-shaping death metal songs is all you need to make an ultimate statement, and it does in fact pair nicely with Abhorrence's self-titled EP from earlier that year.

Member of Immortal Damnation is Purtenance's debut full-length album, released the following year, and it's a step down from the EP due to its relative inconsistency. It's a logical enough step forward, a satisfying enough full-length release for anyone who's heard Purtenance's catalog up to this point, but it's strangely back-loaded and doesn't really get going until after the second instrumental like you'd want a death metal full-length to. The album intro is very dream-like and conjures up the cryptic side of the imagination just as much as the cover art, but the entire first half of "Black Vision" just continues the tone of the intro which really delays any momentum here. This section is similar sounding to a lot of what the Swedish band Gorement would later do on The Ending Quest, which would normally be awesome, but placed here on the album, it's just very ineffective and dull. The second half of this song as well as the banger of a track "Deep Blue Darkness" re-introduces the more devastating Purtenance we knew and enjoyed from the EP, but it's not really a successful buildup despite this 6-and-a-half minute stretch being very enjoyable itself. Given the intro, "Black Vision" had no reason to surpass the 3-minute mark, and worse yet, there's a pointless acoustic track that would've contributed more to an NWOBHM album than something like this. It's very out of place here, and unlike Funebre's comparable interlude, "Spirits Bewail", it doesn't set any atmosphere.

Side A is not entirely a bust, however. In addition to the second half of "Black Vision" and all of "Deep Blue Darkness" making their appreciated contribution, "The Lost Memories" is a very likable, mid-to-slow tempo, but still riff-driven cut, one that is a bit similarly paced to songs like "Profane Creation" by Bolt Thrower. We then get a decent re-recording of "A Dark Cloud Arises" from the EP and at the very end of the album, "Crown Waits the Immortal", neither of which sound as hard-hitting and outstandingly raw as their 1991 counterparts. This isn't all that disappointing, however, considering they're still competent renditions of two fantastic songs and are at any rate the best material featured on Member of Immortal Damnation. A Dark Cloud Arises succeeds at switching to dirgey death metal midway through, which is hard to pull off and it's something that makes this a classic Finndeath song, as does the memorable, grindcore-leaning attack of the other re-recorded track. Cowboys From Hell riffs, however, like the one heard at the beginning of "In the Misty Morning", do not contribute to quality Finndeath - the inclusion of a groove metal motif in this otherwise great song is extremely perplexing and even hilarious.

Another one of Purtenance's best songs is "Reality Isn't Disappeared." I think I initially listened to this song more because of the grammatical error in the title, but it is truly an empathetic, moving death metal piece, proving that this band is more than capable of building up to emotional release, and this leads me to my concluding thoughts on this band: they're a class act and I really like them. In no way were they inherently weaker songwriters or musicians than their contemporaries; they just hadn't found themselves quite as much as slightly more well-recognized Finnish pioneers, and that actually makes this release resonate with me a fair bit despite its songwriting shortcomings. Moreover, the sound itself is actually really enjoyable; most of the riffs find their mark due to the excessively dirty yet still naturally overdriven guitar sound, the deep growls are soaked in some reverb but don't rely too heavily on it, and the pummeling percussion is this band's greatest strength, actually outdoing anyone else in Finnish death metal for my money.

Purtenance's Member of Immortal Damnation is a key example of a flawed classic, but a classic nonetheless, one that really appeals to me. 20 years later, the band did reform with some original members still in the fold and has been prolific since then, offering a lot of sincere and faithful Finndeath with slight updates. Their older work definitely stands on its own, however, and as far as full-length albums go, their debut is in my second tier of death metal favorites, which is actually still really high up there. It might climb its way up there for you too, if you'd like to dig deeper into the Finnish scene and want something that, in many ways, epitomizes the distinct style.

This album is a jumble. The prior Purtenance EP ("Crown Waits the Immortal") was a lean slab of dirty, grindcore-infused death metal. What happened? Nothing major, but a few small things. First, former bassist Toni Honkala switches to playing lead guitar. He managed to get an incredible bass sound on that EP. The new bassist doesn't get the same gritty grindcore tone. Second, Honkala’s solos lack fluidity and exuberance, and are stifled being so quiet in the mix. Third, Harri Salo's bass drums drown everything out. Any sections with double kick drumming suffer the consequence of this. The result is an awkward, lopsided death metal album that lacks immediacy, balance and momentum.

The first couple of tracks are odd. The album begins with a weird instrumental intro, a bit of noodling around on the guitar. "Black Vision" keeps this going, the first two and a half minutes are a boring slow plod without much atmosphere or excitement. Then it jolts into a misplaced fast riff which comes out of nowhere. This is one of the most interesting moments on the whole album. The rest of the song passes without much coherence and then the double kick drumming comes in and dominates the focus. This song is an interesting piece of nonlinear death metal strangeness. There are passing similarities with other Finnish bands like Funebre and Demilich, though Purtenance were less musically talented.

The album then delivers a couple of highlights. "Deep Blue Darkness" is the best song on the album. It begins with a wonderful riff that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Demigod recording. There are several parts of this song that sound properly old and evil, almost like classic Sarcófago. Then the riff at 1:33 is one of the best death metal riffs ever written. Seriously, it sounds evil as hell. The song then fades out before outstaying its welcome. Fantastic. Then there is an excellent acoustic interlude ("Lacus Somniorum"). Honkala was evidently more comfortable playing acoustic than playing solos on the electric guitar at this point. This too fades out before it can get boring. These two tracks are the strongest part of the album without doubt.

The rest of the album is riddled with inconsistency. "The Lost Memories" has some doom-ish riffing, but nothing that would challenge bands like Unholy or My Dying Bride for supremacy. The re-recorded versions of the two EP songs are disappointing and hampered by the production. "In the Misty Morning" is terrible, the riff at the beginning is one of the most awkward moments I've heard on any album, particularly with this dulled guitar tone. In all honesty, there isn't much on the latter half of this album that warrants attention. There are some decent riffs that remind me of Death ("Leprosy"-era), and others that remind me of early Immolation, but that is about it. The soloing is so quiet that you can barely hear it, "Misery of the Rebirth" would be the ultimate case in point. The solo on this song just fizzles out into nothing.

Sure, "Member of Immortal Damnation" is an interesting listen but I don’t think Purtenance had the talent to achieve their ambition. In attempting, they lost the basic intensity of their previous EP. A heavier, darker 'Finnish' death metal production would have strengthened the sound but wouldn’t have solved the compositional problems. There is plenty of depth to this music, and I would recommend this album to hardened death metal fans. However, you’re better off checking the "Crown Waits the Immortal" EP and Funebre's "Children of the Scorn" LP. Both of those records achieve something that this one doesn't, i.e., playing fast and ugly death metal with a weird vibe. I will probably come back to this album again, I might like it more next time, but it will always be a flawed record.

I find myself continuously unable to satiate my raging hard-on for Finnish OSDM, and this unfortunate occurrence always leads me back to revisiting the classics of the scene, Demilich, Demigod (no relation), Convulse, Adramalech etc. Only recently did I decide to give this a second listen, the first ended in disappointment (what a loser I was then.)

Anyways, I gave this another listen and realized how fucking powerful this music is. I don't mean that in "it'll fucking make you headbang till you drop!" I mean rather that this album is so cold. Finndeath, has a tendency to flirt and occasionally full on fuck with doom metal, and this band is no exception. The opening of Black Vision could easily sneak itself onto a funeral doom metal album and be comfortably at home. This music can get dangerously depressing I find, especially when compared to other death metal acts of the same scene, and it is certainly welcome.

This isn't really a case of any one thing being particularly great, it's more a case of every single element working together beautifully and becoming something much more than the sum of it's parts. For example, the drumming is pretty decent, but not great. Paired with the guitar, which is also fairly good but not great, it births an atmosphere of bleak emptiness and it envelopes the listener, and brings them into the music.

I can certainly believe that some of these members were going through some shit when they composed this album. Some of it sounds crushingly dark, especially for something coming in the '90's. It has a very heavy feeling to it, and has no qualms about slowing down with Incantation-esque riffs laden with doomy influences. Each song flows together like a fabric, each riff feels like a progression in the song, rather than something stuck there to add some substance (something I find with modern bands) No note, beat, or growl feels misplaced here. Everything kind of belongs in this one package, released in Finland to a loving crowd in Finland, and no one else really.

It's not perfect. Far from it. But everything just congeals into something imperfect but "beautiful" all the same. This albums really makes me feel. And there's something comforting about that. Don't go in expecting this album to wow you, but allow yourself to be absorbed by it.

If Demigod's acclaimed Slumber of Sullen Eyes is an example of a polished but in my opinion underwhelming Finnish death metal sound, then Convulse's World Without God would be the polar opposite. Sounding dirty and underwhelming is actually harder than you might think, but Purtenance's Member of Immortal Damnation is one instance of such a peculiar flop.

The production on this album is one of the worst for a full-length in 1992, even though it's by no means underproduced or lo-fi. What it is, however, is awfully imbalanced. Timo Häyrinen's vocals are oppressively loud and domineering, and making matters worse is the bass drum, which is unnaturally fat with regards to the rest of the drums (this is especially glaring during double bass-intensive moments). This leaves the guitars in bad shape: lacking both bass and treble, they're just an unwieldy mess of mid-range frequencies. When synths make an appearance on Reality Isn't Disappeared, the guitar tone becomes so horribly mutilated it might as well be non-existent.

Of course, I could easily look past the botched production job if the songwriting made up for it, but this just isn't the case here. My unshakeable predilection for Finndeath tends to elevate even the most half-assed riff to 'somewhat decent', so it almost pains me to call Purtenance's riffs flat-out boring. The aforementioned guitar tone is simply unable to make any of their riffing styles imposing in any way; the doomy opener Black Vision trudges on like a Thergothon song sans atmosphere, and the tremolo riffs scattered throughout range from being paper thin to nearly indiscernible (aside from anomalous Deep in the Darkness, in which the guitars are not only audible, but actually pretty loud).

Purtenance also strays from many of the tropes that would characterise the Finndeath sound, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. Häyrinen's gruff, slightly punkish bark is unlike your typical disembodied Finnish growl, and Toni Honkala's leads are just sort of... there, without ever really contributing to anything. Shit, even Abhorrence, on what could arguably be considered the first death metal release from Finland, had leads better than this. The one thing that barely saves the album from complete mediocrity is Harri Saro's drumming. Despite being rather rudimentary with little in the way of fills, he does throw in a few oddball beats here and there (like the sudden switches from bouncy romping to triplet blasts on A Dark Cloud Arises, or Black Vision's awkward 5/4 beat), so you can at least direct your attention to his drumming if you're getting a bit bored (not an unlikely phenomenon).

For what it's worth, the cheesy but surprisingly pleasant synth closer John 3:16 puts everything that came before it to shame, with an effortless flamboyance that only bands like Nokturnal Mortum could match. In some ways, one could view Member of Immortal Damnation as a missing link between the thrashy grime of early Funebre and Convulse and the more atmospheric approach that bands like Depravity and Adramelech would pursue. But to me it sounds more like a band that didn't really know what they were going for, and somehow managed to put out a bunch of death metal songs through sheer luck - a band whose fall into the depths of obscurity was not unwarranted.

After Purtenance Avulsion released their demo in 1991, they changed their name by dropping the ‘Avulsion’. With this name change came their first official release, the ‘Crown Waits the Immortal’ 7” on Drowned Productions. This EP was a clear indicator that Purtenance intended on keeping the vile nature of their demo intact while making refinements at the same time. This bumped them up even higher on the list of best current death metal bands (well, back from when it was good, at least). A short while later, Purtenance released their magnum opus, the ‘Member of Immortal Damnation’ LP, ranking them up there with Rippikoulu, Depravity, Demigod, and other classic Finnish bands. This album is a perfect, and I mean perfect, example of the preeminence and mastery that bands from this country were achieving at the time.

The production does wonders for the band, as not only does it enhance the filthiness that was already put in place by the music, but it also highlights every instrument, giving each one a proper place in the mix so nothing has an overpowering effect. The vocals aren’t extremely upfront in the mix like a lot of death metal albums. They are somewhat buried, and blend in with the barrage of darkness flawlessly. This kind of gives the same effect that the vocal mix gives Molested’s ‘Blod Draum’ LP in that it becomes another instrument rather then a dominating everything that’s going on (but of course stylistically the two sound nothing alike). The guitar and bass have a pretty equal balance, and both are playing with some extremely hideous tones. The drums are also given their fair share of space in the mix, and are prominent enough to keep the bus moving forward but not to the point where drown out anything else going on.

After things get started off with an intro comprised of a heavily reverberated guitar lead, the bludgeoning begins with the crushing doom-laden opening riffs of “Black Vision”. This element of doom metal keeps appearing throughout the album, but not quite frequently enough to deem this death/doom. These morbid, sludgy sections work as the perfect contrast with the mid-paced sections as well as the faster, blasting sections, which keeps things moving along at a nice enough pace to pull the listener in and not let go. Now of course this is certainly nothing new, as lots of bands from Finland at the time were doing the same thing, but like the previous reviewer mentioned, there weren’t too many doing it quite as well as the mighty Purtenance.

The vocalist, Timo, has a good, powerful growl that you can tell comes from the deepest part of his gut, and maybe picks up some of the shards of glass this guy eats with his cereal every morning. It stays in the mid-lower range, sitting somewhere between Swden’s Crematory and Carnage. The riffing, as I said, alternates between doom-laden devastation and grinding death frenzies, always staying on the low-end of the fretboard and tuning down to somewhere near A or B. The leads are actually more melodic and coherent then you would expect from a lot of other bands, especially during the slow sections. However, sometimes, where the pace picks up and a solo comes in, then it might resort to whammy-abusing atonality, which is never really a bad thing, but it’s just refreshing to hear a band who can fuse melody with sinister evilness as well as these maniacal death metal masters. The guitar tone and bass tone mesh perfectly, as both have equal amounts of filth and putridity caked on top of them, creating a huge wall of towering decay. The drummer is pretty efficient, never missing a beat but never overdoing it with excessive fills and overbearing double bass when it’s not necessary. He also knows how to use the bell of the ride cymbal really effectively, and it doesn’t sound like he just hits it accidentally when beating the shit out of his skins with blastbeats.

This is an excellent piece of old-school Finnish death metal at its finest. I would recommend downloading it first and waiting until The Crypt does the double-LP reissue, which will contain the demo and 7” on one slab and this masterpiece on the other. That is unless of course you are okay with paying a pretty penny for an original pressing, but even then, good luck finding a copy.

Purtenance is an odd, unknown band hailing from Finland. They officially formed in 1990 and released two demos before their debut album, "Member of Immortal Damnation". This record displays excellent craftsmanship in the areas of both doom and death metal, for it seems to be an almost perfect concoction of what both genres have to offer. Make no mistake, there are surely plenty of other bands doing a similar thing, but not very many have 'nailed the bullseye', so to speak, as Purtenance. At times there will be a slow, mournful passage with despondent harmonies layered on one another masterfully, to give the full effect of depressive emotions... And yet they will instantly shred that moment from the listener and break away into a very brutal and pounding cascade of aggressive death metal.

The album is commenced with a short guitar melody ending with a bell toll, invoking thoughts of mystery and expectation as to what will come next. Preceding through the rest of the album is the blend of doom/death metal that many bands today have popularized and are well known for. The second track immediately starts with a plodding, almost as if it were a funeral procession. Not too long into the track is where Purtenance really decides to thrash things around and break away from the doom and gloom, only to enter into the next level: the realm of death.

The structures of the songs I think are what get me the most. Purtenance knows exactly how to keep a listener interested with the music, not keeping too many parts the same, and not deriving too often from their original ideas as to remain consistent. The musicians themselves have such a clear understanding of how each other works, so they can optimize this to the best effect to create music together that utilizes the best of their abilities. For instance, the guitar players will not try to outdistance the drummer in terms of speed, and vice-versa. Everything is practically perfected, including the vocals, which have a most unique texture. Not the usual deep guttural death growl, and not a very typical scream either, almost a blend between the two.

Are you ready to become a Member of Immortal Damnation?