Totalselfhatred

The depressive metal label does not pay justice to Finnish Total Self Hatred. For sure, the founders A. and C. (has someone seen B.?) must not be two joyful guys, and as you can see from the chosen name, the Northern band has the task of translating feelings like despair, sadness, melancholy into music.

But differently from the so called suicide/depressive acts, Total Self Hatred own a stronger intensity, that steers away from the ambient thinness of many similar productions (they often make use of blast beats and accelerations, "Spirituelles Equilibrium", "Ruoska"). To say it all, Total Self Hatred have more than something in common with the proper doom music, like an effective yet poor use of keys with a gothic face ("Sledge Hammered Heart") and a frequent recurring to the double bass drums to strengthen the mid tempos.

That does not deny the core remains rooted into black metal, for the guitars sound (never too freezing anyway) and for the coarse vocal performance (which can even turn into a melodic moaning, "Mighty Black Dimensions"). From the writing point of view we may criticize a certain repetitiveness on background, also due to the length of the songs, but mostly this is corrected by a remarkable refinement of arrangements, where it's impossible to distinguish the keys from the guitar scores being them so entwined, and in this sense a comparison with Dark Fortress seems appropriate. Compliments.

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