Duumipeikon paluu

Aarni is a very deceiving band. I remember a few years back searching for doom like stuff, and I’ve found Aarni’s site, with some downloadable songs. I’ve found a song that had an interesting title: Reaching Azathoth. It was random luck, because I consider this track to be the greatest from Aarni’s all songs.


The whole album itself is an interesting mix of doom metal with some folk and experimental influence. You can find 5-12 min songs. All of them are slow paced down-tuned tracks you might be ready to call them average doom stuff. This is not the case, as about every second song has a very strong folk metal feeling, a bit like those ‘winter-influenced folk-ambients’ lying around, only completed with distorted guitars, (sometimes distorted) basses and drums waving (sometimes with some good reverb) in the background. The mixing of these genres creates a special atmosphere that’s switches from brutal to light and vice versa. But the album’s not finished at all. The last track is something that differs greatly from the other songs. It’s has such a hard experimental feeling, that you nearly wonder “Why didn’t Aarni made the entire album like that?” The mix of crystal clear electronic sounds accompanied with those half folk and half ‘old-school-adventure-game’ sounds (which sound rather original, and creative) and completed with distorted basses and slow paced (slightly synthetic sounding) drums, this track is way more complex than the others. The answer to the above question is simple however: the whole album’s varied this way, by mixing several genres; this just can’t be called average doom metal.

Let’s see guitars; down-tuned, blunt, doomy sounding guitar sounds, playing slow and heavy riffs, sometimes switching to acoustic/clean and playing several parts of folk metal even with some solos. The riffs are catchy; sometimes a Finntroll like part comes along with lots of melody. The other times there are sick doom riffs, and surprise; they are also very catchy. The way the songs are mixed, the variation makes the slow and repeating parts sound great. There’s a good feeling when the some parts fall back to the same guitar riffs, which was played when it started. However, in the meantime, you can hear lots of variation with several instruments, but the distorted guitars and the drums are accompanying the songs for most of the time, not letting the doomy atmosphere fade away.

Most bands, when it comes to doom metal, prefer to bring (distorted or plain) basses to the foreground, making these instruments the most used / heard in their songs. In Aarni’s tracks, you can find simply and bluntly overdriven guitars to be the mostly used instruments (not to count drums). Basses are there, filling the songs, but they are not the main instruments in these songs. Of course without them, the songs wouldn’t sound the way like they do, so the position as filler is important, even if I think they shouldn’t be thrown to the back just to fill the bass lines while the overdriven guitar takes the main role (of guitars of course). The exception once again is the last track, where a distorted bass plays the main parts all along, sometimes accompanied with the distortion guitars.

The keyboard parts are something you expect from an experimental-folk ambient band, quite surprising effects right in the middle of catchy melodies, something new every minute, but always keeping to the melody. There are some false notes (even though they go well with the doom themes), and slippery plays, but those parts are rare, and altogether it’s really good to listen to. Another interesting fact is that apart from melodic death/black/folk bands the keyboards here blend in and out, never staying for more than a few minutes, before the guitars are thrown in and taking the scene, transforming the folkish/experimental feeling into exact doom metal.

Regarding drums, after listening to the songs, one could think that Aarni switches from synthetic ones to real drums from time to time, and vice-versa, but after getting through that, it’s easy to notice that synthetic or real, they always go well along every part of the songs. Mostly keeping to the doom rhythms, slow, scarce beats, but faster parts are present too, once in a while speeding up to folk themes, or completely switching off for slow melodic parts.

Vocals are once again cannot be described in one run. In most of the tracks, you can hear narration-like vocals, deep, and with a hint of gurgling. But in a few parts (once again referring to the last song) it switches to a deeper, and more brutal death/doom vocal, and even to shrieking some kind of a chant for a few minutes. The complexity of the album once again lies in the difference of the tracks.


As closing this review, I can only give some suggestions: if you get a copy, and listen to one of the songs, or even two, don’t judge by that. Also, comparing with previous releases, this one’s obviously a great step forward.
Only (if you are previewing songs) after listening to several parts of all of the tracks, you can get a hint of what’s going on this album, and you can be sure, that it’s nothing sure to expect on the further ones. The percentage given for this album is rather high, because nearly everything can be found what one would expect from a doom/ambient/folk/experimental band.