14 kuuta

Continuing with their seemingly endless stream of brief EP's and demos, Finland's Hämys have offered us here another micro-slice of their deliciously punky, melodic take on the standard style of Finnish black metal. Though it's still far from the full-on album-length release I've been hoping for from these guys, I'll always take what I can get and this EP more than satisfies during its brief 15 minutes.

After a brief ambient intro, the album shifts to the band's usual approach. Pounding punk drum beats alternate with frosty blasting while the guitars likewise veer from punchy strummed chords to triumphant tremolo and back. Songs range once again from two to three minutes, not counting longer intros such as in "Symbolit." The effect is that the band takes the sadguy death worship of bands like Blood Red Fog or Cosmic Church, ups the pace to a rollicking midpaced fist-pumping speed, then ends each song after having played each of the riffs only a relatively small handful of times, rather than wringing every last drop of despair and gravestone dew out of them via hypnotic repetition. It's not super far removed from the simpler bits of older Sargeist, though perhaps a bit more folky and melancholic than that.

Yet, for all the simplicity of the songwriting that Hämys have continued to utilize, the music is actually fairly complex. The melodies are dense and rich, courtesy of the dual guitars (there's no bass) which play rich, fat chords saturated with harmony, the interplay of which results in a lot of those trademark Finnish melodies which simultaneously capture the swelling pride of victory and the hopeless melancholy of the sorrow of grief and loss. What I love about those melodies is that they sort of perfectly embody the spirit of black metal all at once. You've got the raw power and triumph of bands like Gorgoroth bound up together with the the most desperate expressions of longing and mourning and depression that bands like Burzum and their legions of disciples have sought to master.

Something else that I appreciate about this band is their willingness to utilize a varied vocal approach. Frontman Perikato will just as often trade off his lines with drummer Tuska as not, or they'll combine their voices together for a layered effect that brings to mind more of a spirit of brotherhood and collaboration, not unrelated to gang shouts in punk, than it does those sort of layered harsh vocals that create that "demon" effect you hear in a lot of shiny big budget extreme metal. There are also a lot of (also layered) clean vocals used throughout the album, a feature thankfully carried over from the previous EP that adds a lot of human charm and warmth to the songs. Deep, harmonized vocal melodies have a ton of character and naturally are executed with a wonderfully "off the cuff" feeling that's more folky than it is pristine or professional, but it works perfectly in this context. It even works well for the slightly post-punk tinged "Kun Minä Kuolen."

Though I still have my fingers crossed for a proper full-length from these guys, I am beginning to wonder how well the band's unique charms would translate to a longer format with, as is very likely, longer songs. A big part of the appeal with Hämys is how they distill the essence of punky, melodic Finnish black metal down into these two or three minute bursts of energy, and it could very well be the case that some of that vital energy might be lost in translation to a longer format which, I can't help but imagine, would invite longer, more complex or more atmospheric songs. Perhaps I never have to worry, though, as the band have already released another ten-minute EP of material just a month or so before this writing.