my most favourite (metal) band ever are sentenced. founded in muhos, finland, they started as a death metal band in 1989, and continued their journey through various styles of metal before reaching their end in 2005 with the release of their funeral album. i decided to write two posts on sentenced, beginning with their early work. if you prefer gothic metal and don’t like death metal, better wait for part ii which i will probably finish tomorrow.

the first song i want to present is from their first album, shadows of the past. descending curtain of death is a midtempo melodic death metal piece.

their second album is north from here, from which i want to present the song northern lights. another piece of melodic death metal, including very beautiful and slow parts as well as aggressive, fast parts. something i still have to do is to travel to northern finland during winter, sit down into the snow during night, watch northern lights dancing at the sky, and listen to this song.

the third song is from their album amok, the last full album with their singer taneli jarva, who left the band and later founded the black league. the song nepenthe, a melodic balad, also resulted in a music video, in fact the first one by sentenced. here it is:

after the release of amok, sentenced produced an ep called love & death, the last result featuring taneli. from this ep i want to present the song love and death, one of my favourite sentenced songs. fast paced, it is a beautiful, yet sad song about two main themes of sentenced, namely suicide and love. “love and death… go hand in hand once more.”

finally, here’s an interesting death metal piece which was only released in 2008, though it was recorded already in 1994, but not taken onto amok.

today i want to write about the 3rd and the mortal. well, at least about their beginning, since i don’t really know their work after kari rueslåtten left. their early music is rather doomy, while mostly very calm, and with folk influences. well. i guess i won’t write that much, as their music expresses more than 10.000 words. all the following songs are from their first album, tears laid in earth, and one from its preceeding ep, sorrow. these are their only two releases kari was involved in.

finally, here’s an unofficial, but nice video:

the album tears laid on earth is one of the very few which i deliberately bought a second time without a specific reason, to keep it until i can give it to someone worth it. that moment came one a half years ago.

the black league is a finnish band founded by the ex-sentenced singer taneli jarva. they started as a doom metal act, and shifted more and more in the direction of a mixture of metal and rock’n'roll.
their first album, ichor, is the the black league album i like most – probably because it’s their doomiest one, and it contains my most favourite song: ozymandias, a song dedicated to the poem ozymandias by percy bysshe shelley (his wife wrote frankenstein):

i met a traveller from an antique land
who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert. near them, on the sand,
half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
and on the pedestal these words appear:
‘my name is ozymandias, king of kings:
look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
nothing beside remains. round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
the lone and level sands stretch far away.

the song is slow, dark, most of it being rather calm, while the recitation of the spoken words is heavy, powerful:

another song from that album i like a lot is night on earth (not related to the movie of the same name by jim jarmusch, which i also like a lot).

a third song from the album is winter wind sings, a dark balad encompanied with a strange video… “when you cry winter winds sing straight to my heart…”

finally, here’s a newer piece of the band, featured on their homepage at some point. it’s a somewhat ironic video about a concert which is not the biggest success. see for yourself: