Cycle of Life

Ah, nostalgia, one of the things that certainly aren't what they used to be. The old times were so simple. Nations could be placed in the correct order of influence by counting -instead of boring GNPs- such concrete things as megatonnage or the number of dead dogs in orbit. All it took to be evil and street-credible was to play rock'n'roll, and metal was there, still trying to find its place in the world, with no quasi-fascistic sub-genre divisions or needless striving for today's absurd notions of some obscure "purity."

Sarcofagus, the pioneers of the finnish metal scene, the first ones to actually publish a metal album, are active once again. To celebrate their reforming, the band re-released their first full-lenght, Cycle of Life, and by the grace of a strange choice of label, the albums seems to be easily available in hardware stores, on gas stations and every cheap retail warehouse in Finland.

The beginnings of Finland's metal scene may have been almost unnoticeable, but they certainly weren't humble. The band members were interviewed a decade ago on a radio show, and one of the anecdotes they shared was from the very beginning of their gigging career. They had somehow managed to get booked on a gig somewhere in the western coastal area of Bothnia, the home of some of the stiffest, most humourless people in the whole country, and notorious for a violent local culture, especially during evening dances and weddings. When they arrived on the scene, they saw a parking lot filled with 1950's US cars, girls in miniskirts and guys with their hair oiled in the perfect James Dean style. It was quite obvious that the audience was expecting a traditional 50's rock'n'roll show, but being Metal (TM), the band went ahead and played their own material, which, as expected, didn't make the crowd happy. After a few songs, they saw a sea of a few hundred middle fingers in front of them, and frustration grew in both the band and the audience. A band member took the microphone and addressed the audience:
He: "James Dean!"
Audience: "YYYEEEEAAAH!"
He: "Well, he's dead!"

To do that, in the area where they did it, could be seen as an attempted suicide by proxy, and perhaps tells something of the band's attitude at the time. It also shows the kind of difficulty met by metal pioneers in a country barely in the process of overcoming the growth pains of urbanization, with traditional values and a slowish rural way of life. We have come a long way, and Sarcofagus gave birth to a scene that is thriving today.

Cycle of Life is an old album. That much is obvious on the first spin, and a deeper analysis of the individual tracks, the odd production and some of the stylistic choices awakens an interesting idea. Could it be that Sarcofagus, the grand-dads of all metal in Finland, didn't really have too much in the way of idols to form their musical ideas on? Were they pioneers in more than just creating a tiny metal scene in the distant smelly armpit of Europe, perhaps even having to come up with their own definition and recipe for metal?

To explain the idea further, the album must be broken down into components. The vocals, by Hannu Leiden, are something a modern metal band would definitely not use, and would fit a 70's rock band. The guitars, with their odd, almost kazoo-like buzzing sound, are not what people think about when "metal" is mentioned, and some of the lead work would fit an early Deep Purple album. Some songs, especially the second to the last, Subconscious Penetrating, are pure 70's rock, and the odd-ball trilogy of tracks in the middle is an experimental psychedelic ambient construct of noise and sound, and could be a simulated drug trip in the way such things were depicted in sci-fi movies in the late 60's and early 70's; it was most probably created by fellows who most likely had never had access to any real drugs. The album is certainly not what metal in the great wide world already meant at that point, seeing that Judas Priest had already amassed enough material to release the magnificient Unleashed in the East , the mother of all live albums and a metal compilation without significant competition from its contemporaries a year earlier; Sarcofagus was lagging behind, but damn, they tried, and the result is at least respectable; the lagging isn't certainly their own fault, and even if their music leans towards psychedelia and prog rock, it still has a heart of heavy metal pulsating in its core.

So, it may well have been a case of founding the very first metal band in the country, without having access to decent equipment, with little to learn from, and a drive of a stubborn rhino. Once the band had been founded, it was a question of what to do, and it must be said that the result, Cycle of Life , is an enjoyable snapshot of something that happened over a quarter of a century ago. It also shows what alternative paths metal could have taken instead of the road opened by NWOBHM bands and their descendants and followers.

The band went on, and the album Moottorilinnut , under the moniker Kimmo Kuusniemi Band, is already a completely different beast. The fact that such personalities as Kirka and Muska Babitzin sang in the band is a testimony to the signifigance of the band. Kirka tried, a decade later, to return to hard rock and metal, even to the point that he released ill-fated albums called R.O.C.K. and The Spell that consisted of cover versions of songs by Steppenwolf among others, but his fate was to die as one of the most respected schlager singers in the country; to his credit, it's fair to admit that his schlagers are among the most tolerable in the sorry history of finnish schlager.

The really strange thing about the Cycle of Life is the fact that it's virtually unknown in Finland. I know more foreigners than Finns who actually know the name of the first finnish heavy metal album. It's a pity, and needs to be corrected; the album is a good one, and an important piece of history.