I already mentioned that Finland has one of the best European underground scenes in my humble opinion. The mighty Inverse Records never ceases to amaze me with their releases and this time I listened and reviewed for this webzine the new album by Callidice.
Hailing from Jyväskylä town area, this band plays melodic death metal and they do it with vigorous style. After one demo in 2015.and one e.p. in 2016. this is their debut album. This record contains 8 songs of melodic and sometimes brutal death metal done with heart and soul. The album is a concept lyrical story about friendship, fear of losing, sibling bonds and it all evolves around a tale of two brothers. The song structures sometimes reminded me of early Amorphis circa “Black Winter Day” era and it is not a bad thing at all to sound a bit like that. Besides growling vocals the clean and melodic vocals fit very nice into songs like for example in “Scarred” which is my personal favorite song on this record. As album highlights I must also mention “Brotherhood of bastards” and the title track being excellent songs that stand out somehow for me above the rest of the material. This is a great melodic death metal album.
I waited for a long time to watch this documentary since it came out, but I finally did it and I was not disappointed.
Fat Wreck Chords is one of my all time favourite, if not the favourite record label in the world. Founded in 1991.by Nofx bassist/singer Fat Mike and his now ex wife Erin, this label continues to be an epitome what melodic punk hardcore is all about. The movie describes the begginings with early bands signed, like Lagwagon, No Use For A Name, Propagandhi, Strung Out…and continues until these days with third or fourth generation of Fat bands like The Bombpops, Bad Cop/Bad Cop for example. Through the stories narrated by the band members, Fat Mike, Erin we now know how the Fat sound started to become reality. I loved the Tony Sly part and the interesting part about Propagandhi pissing off Fat Mike when they targeted him in their lyrics because of the disappointment with Fat Mike´s involvement in Punkvoters.com, I won´t say movement, rather initiative when they tried to vote the lesser of two evils to become the next U.S.president. But, what is most important throughout all these 25 years of Fat, the music continues its legacy and every year new and new legions of punk kids discover the beauty of punk scene through Fat Wreck Chords bands that were there and that they are here now. I also owe a great much of my punk upbringings to Fat Mike and Erin and their vision and I will be forever greatfull to them for discovering through their label some of the bands and records that became my all time favourites. Get and watch this one!
Ratbreed is the band from Finland and their new record is coming out via Inverse Records so I was able to listen to it and review it for this webzine.
Finland is the land of metal as everybody knows, this relatively small European country holds a great number of excellent bands be it melodic like Stratovarius, Nightwish, Sonata Arctica or Impaled Nazarene, Finntroll, Children of Bodom, to name only a few more known bands. Ratbreed comes from melodic approach to heavy metal playing a combination between classic pumping heavy metal and fast power metal. This record contains 8 songs plus one cover song by Warlock. The songs sometimes remind of the 80-ies classics for example Helloween or Gamma Ray and early Hammerfall in the second half of the 90-ies. Vocalist Jasmin is convincing with her voice and not trying to sound like anyone´s copy so, that is another plus for this band. Musically, the band is incredibly tight and the production of the record sounds great like a metal record of this kind should sound like. My personal favorites of the record are “Blaze from Below” and “Through the flames”. This is nothing new or special or revolutionary but it is a decent metal album.
KRAYKULLA-WEBZINE 