From the always prolific Finland comes Vuolla, band that after several years of activity arrives at the debut full length entitled Blood. Stone. Sun. Down. A not insignificant detail, our band comes from Jyväskylä, a city located about 300 km north of Helsinki, from which Swallow The Sun also started, which is a pretty strong clue about the kind of sound we should expect from this work. In fact, Vuolla plays a melodic death doom that takes its cue more from the first works of the band than from the last ones, even if it is characterized by the voice of Kati Kalinen, who alternates with the growl of Kalle Korhonen. Let’s say right away that the voice of the keyboard player (as well as wife of guitarist Ilari Kallinen) is not really the strong point of the band, even if its almost adolescent timbre integrates well with a sound that makes of a melancholic mood its raison d’être, developing along coordinates that often touch the right chords, with remarkable and far from obvious cues. The almost seventy minutes of music poured into Blood. Stone. Sun. Down. do not tire at all, demonstrating the absolute goodness of the proposal and the compositional brilliance of Vuolla, who sometimes let themselves go to digressions of post-metal matrix within a few songs without ever losing sight of the ultimate goal, to compose exciting songs and painful trend. Moreover, the album enjoys an average high quality level, without tracks that stand out in a decisive way compared to a homogeneous tracklist in which, perhaps, are preferred the swallowiana Emperor and, in general, the moments in which the two voices alternate creating that contrast of atmospheres that is the salt of the genre. Vuolla‘s debut is, therefore, a further piece that is added to a mosaic in which the Finnish movement is always the master, since the time of Thergothon, to stay on the most funereal slopes of doom, and Decoryah, a band that illuminated with two magnificent records the scene of the early ’90s and which sometimes bring back passages and moods contained in Blood. Stone. Sun. Down.

2016 – Schwarzdorn Production