Autumnal

It’s the end of the year and I have some cool days off and thus time to listen to some stuff I almost forgot about. For instance, I have the two records Autumnal and Eclipse done by this Finnish band called Legenda featuring Sir Luttinen who was a previous member of the Finnish band Impaled Nazarene. For whatever reason, he left his previous bandmates and teamed up with his friend Niko Karppinen to come up with a new atmospheric black metal band with a great gothic approach. Legenda’s material is clearly depressive metal. Do not listen to it if you have just been dumped by your girl otherwise you will just want to shoot yourself. Their music is made of brilliant melodies and clever ideas, mostly keyboard inspired and quite atmospheric and moody. No doubt Sir Luttinen is a classy songwriter and an especially good musician since he handles the guitars, drums, synths and even the vocals, but what’s left for his bandmate Niko Karppinen is bass guitar. I bet the guy just had to lay down his bass guitar part on the material written by Sir Luttinen. It almost sounds as a one guy affair with the help of a friend. This is the main weakness of this album, it remains unvarying. The whole album sounds rather too atmospheric and quite expressionless although very much colored in its entirety, but it might fail to grab your full attention after a couple of listens. The album has its great moments such as Legend, By The Moonlight, Wolves Honey Wolves or Black Sky, but you definitely have the feeling that you're listening to one long unvarying song. Autumnal is a fairly good first album for this band who seems to be now on hiatus. They have indeed released a second album Eclipse but then they seemed to have just vanished from the metal scene, although Sir Luttinen is now a permanent member of The Black League. Too bad, I would have loved to see them exploring further gothic horizons.