Tomb of Finland
Below the Green

I don’t think that it will be much of a challenge to geographically place this band. They hail from a few feet beneath the green Finnish grass in a cemetery somewhere in the land of metal and coffee. They were dug into the ground in 2009 and were shortly exhumed in 2012 for a demo song but they have really been eaten by the worms until now when their debut album Below the Green sees light of day on Danish metal label Mighty Music.

There are four coffins needed for this band, being a quartet and all. Their music is quite modern while keeping to a traditional 80s/90s doom/death metal sound but with a lot more melody. The singer is a fairly typical growler, not a very interesting one I should point out. The sound is excellent, I think the production is really good and amongst the best I have heard in this style of music. The songs are however, not particularly varied and they sound quite similar through the album. But the album is short so it might be easy to overlook that little thing because of that, they have the decency to be short and to the point.

It is a baffling album however. I should like it, it has good melodies, it is heavy and dark, kind of morose in a sense – a graveyard at autumn feel. I like such things but I don’t particularly like this album, not that it is awful or anything but it is not good. There is nothing that grabs my attention, the songs melt together and the great melodies becomes something of a standalone that is ruined by the songs and the vocals – it is all very baffling it is such an album that it has a style that should appeal to me, but for some reason it doesn’t. The question is why it doesn’t and the answer might be because of the songs, the album has no standout track, not attention-grabbing hit song, not a good vocalist and the songs feels very similar all the way through the album. I think they failed to live up to their potential thanks to a less than stellar work when it comes to writing the songs.

Everything else is quite good, I think that it would even work well with the vocals had the songs been more interesting. It will probably be best to entomb these songs along with the band members, allowing them to mature in the dirt beneath the green for some more time and then rise up from the grave when they are ready to wow us with some exciting music. I don’t doubt they are capable of creating such music, and would not be surprised if their next album is such an album, but being capable of doing something and actually doing it are two separate things. Tomb of Finland shows fantastic potential but delivers a sub-par album, that is the sad reality for these graveyard heroes – I hope (and believe) in something wonderful the next time around.

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