Metallica Finland

Do you know what the common characteristic to all of the following: racing, sky diving and sky jumping? Yes? No? I will tell you, it’s all about speed and yes we are talking about Speed (fucking) Metal, the Thrash kind of real Speed that bands like VENOM and even DRAGONFORCE and I will not get into the debate regarding the difference between Thrash, Speed and Power Metal. SPEEDTRAP are what I would like to call old school Speed Metal, fast, furious, no holds bar, hand molting and head banging…

From classical cover band devoted exclusively to performing Metallica's symphony-friendly epics to all purpose string ensemble interpreters of other heavy metal bands' music for the cello, to composers of original material fit to mingle with even more metallic translations, Finland's Apocalyptica had come a long way in the span of their first three albums. And, naturally, there were bound to be further innovations lined up for the band's fourth opus, Reflections, which arrived in 2003 bearing not a single heavy metal cover, and introducing several unexpected innovations into Apocalyptica's m.o., to boot. Chief among these was the addition of a drummer behind the group (recently paired down from quartet to trio), and since Apocalyptica's virtuosos would hardly stand for anything short of brilliance for such an assignment, that percussionist wound up being none other than Slayer legend Dave Lombardo…

A lot has happened in Ville Laihiala’s musical career. The frontman/vocalist that most of us know as the former Sentenced vocalist and the frontman of Poisonblack made a sudden decision and disbanded Poisonblack 2 years ago. Many fans wondered what he was going to do… VL ended the discussion by forming S-TOOL in 2016. Some familiar names in the Finnish metal scene joined him in this project. They have managed to speed things up by launching a crowdfunding campaign which was a success thanks to many fans, friends and Radio Rock. The result? The debut album of S-TOOL named “Tolerance 0”. Let’s dig deep.

Too Mean to Die is the sixteenth studio album by German heavy metal band Accept, released on 29 January 2021. It is the first Accept album to feature Martin Motnik, who replaced original bassist Peter Baltes in 2019, and rhythm guitarist Philip Shouse, who joined the band that same year. Speaking of heavy metal kingpins, when ACCEPT first launched at the end of the 70s, the metal genre didn’t even exist - at first the band could only be labelled with the (quality) seal “crazy loud and crazy wild”. Today we know that this was (and is) metal par excellence. And we also know that ACCEPT opened the door to thrash metal, inspiring giants such as Metallica. Guitarist Kirk Hammett recently stated in the German magazine “Gitarre & Bass”: “Wolf Hoffmann has a huge influence on me.“