BW & BK ( No 76 Jan / Feb 2004 )
By Chris Bruni

No Poor man´s Bodom
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First there was Omnium Gatherum´s Spirits And August Light, then Mors Principium Est´s Inhumanity, and now another new Finnish crop called Elenium are prepared to amaze us with their debut album, For Giving - For Getting, on Rage Of Achilles.

Unique, Hard-hitting, visceral, emotional progressive death metal that possesses wicked fortitude,
Elenium ( comprised of vocalist Jukka, keyboardist Johannes Salo, guitarists Kasperi Heikkinen and Tommi Leinonen, bass player Tuomo Raisanen, and drummer Mikko Niemela ) seem like a band for people who thought Amorphis flaked out after Tales From The Thousand Lakes. Maybe a mini death metal version of Dream Theater or Symphony X.
"The comparisons to Amorphis are pretty much out of date if you just listen to the music," says bassist Tuomo. "They were a huge influence for us in the mid ´90s and the fact that they were from the same ´hood as us was important. It gave us hope that you can make it pretty far from the suburbs by doing your own thing. They haven´t influenced our music for years, even though I respect them as a band. I really can´t make a list of our influences because each member of Elenium has his own taste. Dream Theater is surely a band of great musicians but from that progressive edge, Symphony X is definitely the number one band for us, especially for Johannes and Kasperi. They seldom run out of superlatives when speaking of that band. On the other hand, most melodic Finnish metal bands are compared to Children of Bodom no matter what they sound like. Luckily there aren´t so many poor man´s Bodoms around anymore."

"Being formed in 1995 and working more or less professionally since ´98, we´re not totally newcomers within the industry," Tuomo replies. "We´ve already experienced a shit load of negative things in this business. We have done three demos and lots of promos for zines and labels. Kasperi has had his own band, Merging Flare, for ten years and he`s studying to become a professional musician so he has a lot of experience. Johannes started playing piano when he was four years old and the rest of us have been playing for about ten years or so. But being a star and playing five-thumbed truck driver isn´t a way of getting appreciation in here. The more you learb to play the better you understand how lousy you actually are."

Finland has spawned quite the interesting metal scene, newer bands like Omnium Gatherum, Mors Principium Est and Elenium, making the best impression this year...
"You may have a point there. I too have noticed that most Finnish bands have something in their music that makes it sound Finnish. There´s a certain melancholy involved mostly. I have also noticed that the standard of metal bands in Finland is really high at the moment. Omnium Gatherum are really good friens of ours. We´ve played most of our recent gigs with them and I´ve also played one gig as Omnium Gatherum´s bass player when their bassist was unavailable. Our vocalist Jukka also growls on two songs of Omnium Gatherum´s Spirits album and Kasperi also played one solo for that album. But we still are pretty unknown in Finland, probably even more unknown than somewhere else in Europe because most of our promotion for the last five years has been for other countries rather than Finland."

"The main theme on the album is the selfishness of the human mind and different aspects on how it reflects in the world we live in," Offers Tuomo, reflecting on the album´s themes. "We´ve experienced some really depressing events before the studio sessions because our equipment literally drowned in shit after a sewer broke down near our rehearsal place. That and some personal unfortunate happenings may have brought some extra gloomy and bitter atmosphere to the album. Some people are probably upset because our music is called progressive death and we don´t actually write about death. We didn´t invent the enormous need to categorize all music. In our case it is much more brutal to write about the tragedy of being alive than some imaginary stories about dissecting human bodies. I don´t judge bands who do that because they do it better than we ever could. It´s just not our thing."

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