Marianas Rest

Finland has a few twists of its own in a couple of metal genres. The proggier stuff here seems to settle on a relatively light-weight sound, more than just occasionally caressing the bordering no-man's-land between metal and prog rock. The black metal scene has its share of traditional medium-tempo bands with an earthy or forest-like smell in their metal, and the power metal bands seem to be simultaneously singing in falsetto and farting swarms of butterflies and flowers within the confines of their own and instantly recognizable format.

But none of the genres mentioned above really capture the local mid-winter darkness, melancholy, and solitary spirit quite as well as the local brand of melodic doom-death. You know, the kind of slow, growled, heavy and yet melodic grumpiness with its occasional spots of beauty; the kind of metal spearheaded by Swallow the Sun and its followers? Yup, that sums up something in the Finnish character quite nicely. A local saying sums it up: "paistaahan se aurinko joskus risukasaankin", or, roughly translated with a bit of intentional liberty taken, "you may live under a pile of twigs and branches, and yet you may sometimes see a ray of sunlight". Yeah, happy oysters, us Finns, truly...

Marianas Rest is a surprisingly good new band pitching in on the growing pile of that local style. The band's first demo, highly imaginatively named Marianas Rest, was released two years before the band's debut full-length Horror Vacui, and superficially, it presents a band that should by all means have been making a full-length already at that stage. As we were to see later, it was a very good thing the debut took the time it did, because Horror Vacui definitely exceeds the already high expectations set by this trio of songs; Marianas Rest is a great demo, but the follow-up was even better than what it lead people to expect.

Marianas Rest is eighteen minutes of growling, low-tempo drumming, heaviness, and growls. The melodic character of the music stems from the way the lead guitar sings its long, sorrowful, and, at times, quite beautiful tunes, all found on the Finnish template of melodic doom-death. The changes in the music's dynamics are already apparent on the three songs, and were bound to gain more prominence on the debut; they enhance the beauty, make the heaviness even more crushing when it returns after a lull, and make the songwriting achieve a higher level than the heaviness and slow pace could do alone.

The quality of the demo is generally very high, all the way from the well-designed digipak to the production values. The balanced sound is close to major studio quality, and the band's technical skill is relatively high. A mild temporary dip in songwriting does take place, however, on the second track. It does not quite soar to the highs of the two preceding songs, maybe because it sticks to its higher tempo throughout, and somehow feels less finely crafted that the other two. And, as usual for demo level bands, the vocals are not quite there yet... a problem that would definitely be corrected during the next two years, before the debut.

Marianas Rest is a nice name for a band, and Marianas Rest shows huge potential, even if with a bit more straightforwardness and less of the band's individuality than what was to follow, as well. The band would spend the next two years finding its own sound and refining its concept, and as the result, the debut would be devastatingly good and a release with a character that belongs to Marianas Rest alone; but nobody knew it at that time, and as a demo by a relatively unknown band, the three songs must thus be judged without the knowledge and bias the later release would bring along. And even by the yardstick of untainted demos, Marianas Rest is a very good start.