There are five and a half million people living in Finland, and around 3,650 heavy metal bands from Finland listed on Metal Archives. By removing pensioners and young people who can’t have a recording contract yet, by my ready reckoning, that means that around one in a thousand people from Finland are actively in a heavy metal band that has recorded at least a demo. All of which brings me to Cemetery Fog – a Finnish heavy metal band that tends towards the moody, slower end of death metal primitivism. Could Cemetery Fog be the shape of Finns to come?
Erm…no, probably not. Which isn’t to say that this five track EP is bad, exactly – in fact, I would say that there is plenty to enjoy here, though to be honest I found the inclusion of a fairly unremarkable intro and an outro on a five track EP a bit much. Of the three remaining tracks, well, there are some neat ideas here which I found myself appreciating more than I thought I might. So yes, the production is a tad thin – particularly on the guitars, which sound pretty reedy and insubstantial at points, though I gather this might be a deliberate attempt to make them sound as though they are lo-fi and primitive. For the most part, these are death metal inspired doom tracks, with an appropriately murky and atmospheric feel.
At their best, Cemetery Fog sound like an unholy mix of Forest of Equilibrium -era Cathedral, the occult grimness of Runemagick and the primitive death metal of someone like Necrophagia. The stand out of the EP is middle track “Embrace of the Darkness”, which captures the attention due to the sheer eclectic mix within its seven minute passage – including acoustic passages, clean vocals to back up the normal hoarse, gravelly bellows, and the layering of some none-too-shabby keyboard sections. Sadly, on both “Withered Dreams of Death” and “Shadow of her Tomb”, I think that the songs outlived the amount of interesting material they had to offer. Nine minutes is a long time to try and wrangle an amount of listener interest in one idea, and while I would definitely say that I appreciate the aesthetic and bleak, doomed atmosphere that Cemetery Fog were going for, the other two songs could definitely have done with either more variety from the slow bit / fast bit / slow bit blue print, or trimming down to roughly half their length.
All that being said, I certainly think that there is room for the band to build on this as a foundation. I found them most effective when they were concentrating on the doomy sections, rather than shoe-horning in the death metal. As with all foundations, it’s what is built next that is going to set them apart from their neighbours. Sign me up for a listen to the full album to see what they build next.
(5.5/10 Chris Davison)
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