TULIKOIRA

One of Circle's heaviest releases. The cover art says it all here. This album is packed with full on angry and energetic metal tunes like in their Sunrise album, but darker. Their minimalist tendencies are less prominent here, but this is still a Circle album.

This album starts off with "Rautakaarme", a song that takes you by surprise at first. Starting with drone in the background that gives the impression of being another Krautrock adventure by Circle, but when the power chords start and the drone stop you'll know that this won't be an album to get high to. This is balls to the walls metal! Rapid fire drums, head banging riffs, the whole ten yards. The second song "Tulilntu", while being the shortest in the album it's still as hard hitting as the one that came before it, even more so thanks to Mika Rättö's screaming vocals that suits the style perfectly. In the third song on the album "Berserk" starts off as just like the previous two songs, but by the middle of it or so we start to hear Mika's spacey keyboard touches that gives a break to all the anger and fury of the first minutes of the album. And from here on the rest of the album won't sound the same.

Now, the last song on this album, "Puutiikeri", takes the show to another level. In here you can find Prog, Metal and Krautrock co-existing in one 24 minute jam/song. This is definitely the highlight of the album. It goes through many different moods and atmospheres that's really a very engaging experience. It's the first time I heard the mixing of those genres in one song as well so I was very excited when I heard it.

This is yet another musical ground covered by Circle and very well executed too. If you can imagine yourself liking a kraut hippie playing heavy metal under the influence of LSD then you will most likely enjoy this album.

3.5 out of 5