Impaled Nazarene impress with 'Pro Patria Finlandia'
After 15 years and almost as many albums, Finland's Impaled Nazarene have shown they still have it in them to produce a Black metal album with enough bile, storm and heaviness to please. With a slightly nationalistic cover and album title 'Pro Patria Finlandia' and song names like 'Cancer' and 'Goat Sodomy', the band certainly make no apologies for what they are, which is reflected in the brutal quality of this album. With a style that is diverse enough to range from Motorhead to Emperor fans, the band surely must make the best of all the metal stylings in their repertoire? And they most definitely do.
Opener 'Weapons To Tame A Land' opens with rolling and fast-paced drums before slightly relaxing back into a riff and solo driven black-thrash exploration, and whilst the guitar solo on offer gets a bit too widdly for the more upfront qualities the band seemingly espouse, it is nonetheless a good song. Songs like 'Contempt' and 'Goat Sodomy' are short and sweet offerings, reminiscent in spirit (although thankfully not in musical style) to the offerings of grind metal, swapping a lengthier and more in-depth exploration of a song for a simple short shock of metal.
The album isn't perfect, a few too many widdly guitar solos in the vein of the thrash styles that Impaled Nazarene incorporate which don't sit too comfortably with the black metal on offer elsewhere in each song, plus the album is a little too short and we could have had an extra ten minutes or so on the album comfortably without it losing any of its value or appeal.
'Pro Patria Finlandia' offers little new for fans of the band, nor is it anything that hasn't been done before in the genre. But to expect such things is quite unfair, and what Impaled Nazarene do offer is a solid 40 minutes of good quality black metal. Their thrash influences may not be for everyone, and that's fair enough, but credit must be given where it is due and 'Pro Patria Finlandia is undoubtedly a well written, well performed and well executed example of what Finland has to offer to the black metal scene today.