We look for new bands and artists to feature for Nordic Music Review in all kinds of places – there are some great blogs out there that we respectfully look up to, for example, such as Meadow Music (Sweden) and of course One Chord to Another (Finland), as well as Social Media, Soundcloud and Bandcamp. However one great way we’ve come across new artists is to simply look at Festival line-ups, and gig listings. So when we spotted that a Finnish band named ‘Holy Roman’ were playing (tonight actually)at the Semi-Final in Helsinki, supporting the excellent Love Sport who we’ve featured previously, and Swedish band Alexandria, it was worth checking them out.
And we quickly found this:
Now this is part of a 2 song Demo (dont forget this is just the demo...) brilliantly entitled 'Looking at an Escher painting made me go blind', and the above track is called 'Ähtäri'. Its startlingly good, the dual drummers pound out a massive beat, and the huge cavalcade of guitars relentlessly drive the track through. Within seconds I knew we’d stumbled across something pretty outstanding, and the more subtle vocals I think work really well. The emphasis here is Noise, and whilst they describe themselves as ‘blazing through eardrums like a mad buffalo on cocaine’, there’s no doubt that the overall result is something different, a sound which separates them from the masses. I love the fact that they’re not afraid to use big instrumental sections in their songs, and whilst they sound different, they do favourably remind me of some of my favorite UK bands such as Crippled Black Pheonix.