Aijna

Arvet's first album demonstrates a real turnaround after the earlier EP "Ihmiskarsimys": the music has a full and energetic sound and flows much better due in no small way to A's drumming. Main man Noxifer is able to concentrate on what he's best at doing which is playing guitar andwriting music. There is a full-time vocalist now and his voice plus Noxifer as fellow vocal duellist help to define Arvet's style even more. Having a live drummer also makes a huge difference as the songs are no longer in thrall to an inflexible mechanical beat and can change speed and mood as the musicians please. This means Noxifer and the others have the freedom to compose and play music as they prefer, and there is greater scope for improvisation on the fly.

The music is often super-fast and scrabbly and gives the impression that if it slowed down at any time, the whole cranked-up beast would fall apart immediately. The texture of Arvet's sound is raw and scrapey and the clear clean production emphasises every jagged, distorted tone. A definite cold, empty and dark atmosphere exists in most songs and anguished howls appearing to come from distant hells can be heard. The musicians demonstrate a high level of technical proficiency in each and every song while they rocket along: melodies, riffs and rhythms change swiftly and precisely and few songs allow time for listeners to absorb everything they're hearing.

The first few times when you listen to the album, the songs pass by in a blur and you might be hard pressed to distinguish among individual songs that keep adding new riffs and melodies throughout right up until the end. Each song does actually have its distinct riffs and that these rarely repeat during its whole course. As the lyrics in all songs are in Finnish, those listeners who know the language will get far more out of the album than the rest of us but we non-Finns can still enjoy the singing and treat it as an extra layer that embellishes the music: the vocals convey quite a lot of emotion ranging from anger and hostility to despair and pain.

The fact that each song conforms to a general template of continuous change means that no one song really stands out above the rest in technical virtuosity. On an emotional level though, one of the middle tracks "Hirtetyn Mestarin Temppeli" makes an impression for a fairly lengthy passage of pained howling over steady mid-paced tremolo guitar strumming. Later songs tend to be a bit slower than earlier ones, "Liekehtivä Dharana" being one such example where the music travels at cruising crunch speed with very few moments (if any) of blast-beat spitfire and ending in an unexpected extended droning-guitar feedback passage that might have come straight out of the Deathspell Omega guitar-experimentation manual.

Overall this is a robust and consistent work with a lot of energy, of which there's more in the first half of the recording and near the end, and not so much in tracks 5 to 7. Perhaps a couple of the longer tracks could have been edited for length to give the album more punch and the musicians do go a bit overboard on the blast-beat explosions in the first half of the album. There is no denying though that these guys mean business and intense business at that.