Hautakammio "Kukaan Ei Opasta Teitä Pimeässä" Cassette

Limited to 100 hand-numbered copies.
Black cassette shell with sticker on both sides.
Professionally printed, double-sided, glossy, 5-panel foldout J-card.
Recorded during the winter 2012-2013 at Patologian Laboratorio.

Hautakammio are not a difficult band to understand. Playing excruciatingly raw black metal at a blistering pace, all machinegun blasts and whirring tremolo, the band is obviously participating in the Behexen approach of raising the fist of the Satanist to celebrate Christ's fall. Don't let the black and white photo of trees on the front fool you: there's no foresty shit here, only Satan.
Human drum machine Ruho plays a nearly endless torrent of blastbeats, only letting up to savagely abuse his drum kit with pounding rock beats or double bass beats during the band's few bits of stomping, punky death worship that serves to break up this 33-minute whirlwind of tremolo and hatred. Everything is downsampled to a vicious mono mix that sees the guitars, (I guess?) bass, drums and throat-shredding shrieks all crammed into the dead center of the audio. For this reason, this stuff really sounds better blaring from a nice speaker setup or even your car stereo than it does headphones, where it just sounds a bit weak due to the infinitely narrow sound stage.
Hautakammio simply do not let up on this album. If the album title wasn't already an indication, the vocals this thing are and endless torrent of blasphemy. The only times they really let up are during intros or just get dragged out into elongated screams and growls rather than bloodstained spittle flying from lips during the streams of multisyllabic Finnish invoking of the majestic throne of Satan. Fans of early Gorgoroth will be well pleased, as of course will connoisseurs of the aforementioned Behexen, as Nagh gives a half-hour demonstration of why this kind of standard second wave vocal style is so often emulated in all manner of black metal bands.
Despite their sheer violence, it's not at all like this is an experience without melody or hooks. These guys are Finns, after all, so the guitars necessarily surge through muscle-flexing, hellfire melodies in the tremolo workouts. Nothing ever sounds sad or melancholy or nostalgic; Hautakammio draw exclusively from the triumphant, power-exuding side of bottomless well of Finnish black metal melodies. The opening chords of the eight-and-a-half minute centerpiece "IV" serve as a fitting example, fanfare played to the dark lord, before the band shifts into something more menacing in the tremolo, before shifting again to a neck-wrecking powerchord section. Just around one minute and you get the whole album (and band's) M.O. laid out for you.
It's easy for many to hand-wave this kind of stuff away as being utterly derivative, bringing nothing at all new to the table, but the real draw of this music has nothing to do with it's originality (or lack of it). What makes the band compelling is that they're working in a well-defined tradition, with influences as obvious as nearly any you'll find in metaldom, but the end result still bears the marks of its creators. Take, for example, those pure heavy metal guitar leads that get shoved into that two-dimensional mix, like during the middle parts of "IV" or near the end of "II". They perfectly meld classic leather and bullet belts heavy metal bravado with those unquestionably Finnish, black melodic tendencies to add something that fits the whole aesthetic so perfectly you'll wonder why the hell you haven't really heard it before in this context.
Here's to bands like Hautakammio keeping stoked the eternal hellfires of the second wave. Death is greeted with open arms as "V" comes to a close in a triumphant blaze of glory, leaving no doubt in my mind that these guys and their likeminded comrades will do exactly that for ages to come.

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