The underground death metal world is fixated on the bestial and the classic Swedish sound. One provides the assurance that you need not know how to write a song, play an instrument, nor properly invest in a professional recording, and the other one assures you that the audience is fixated on typicality and that retrograde riffing and the right pedal are all it takes.
Huoripukki, who hail from Nokia, Finland, tag themselves as death metal, have five demos in their discography, have been around since 2008, and provide an alternative. Their sound is bestial, alright, only you can hear the riffs and the arrangements. It is not all madness and an extended blur. Nor is it the distant cousin to Entombed’s Left Hand Path. In fact, at times it seems like Huoripukki’s sound is crumbling to pieces, barely kept together by relentless drumming, chaotic growling, punk riffs and a beat that is on life support.
Voima On Oikeutta is crowned by guttural vocals, that is no surprise. Those subhuman belches have nothing to do with the music, beats, speed, or melodious structure…it is all kept separate or sliced apart by subhuman gutturality and the odd congeniality between both.
Label: Caligari Records
One can’t help but listen to Voima On Oikeutta and think of punk and grind. There is no dbeat here and no trace of Swedeath semblance. At times, the album rushes through desperately. “Antropomorfia” (the third song), for instance, blasts through and stomps all over the listener, with no care for melody, beginning or end. But that mindset plays no role on the three other songs.
Huoripukki start this official recording with “Maailma Haudaksi,” a thrashcore song crowned by monstrous vocals. In the middle, a hardcore riff is topped by monotone gutturality. Cool stuff. Just imagine DRI playing inside a cave in bizarro world, and having been turned into man-eating monsters. Take away the vocalist Kurt Brecht and replace him with a deaf beast that manhandles the mike.
Voima On Oikeutta only contains four songs, but there is enough ingenuity here to inform a generation stuck on what’s mentioned above: chaos, death metal and raw punk. It is not about originality, it is just about thinking outside the box, and Huoripukki are now part of the elite in a country that nowadays has a young generation willing to make their forebears proud.
