O how glorious a thing Perima Vihassa Ja Verikostossa is! Horna, unlike their more pure-minded Norwegian laborers in the craft, don’t have a chip on their shoulder about rock and roll, and this makes all the difference in the world. A lot of black metal, to its eternal discredit, carries a bunch of racist/nationalist baggage with it, and wants on racist grounds to separate itself from the rhythm and blues influence that is undeniably at the heart of all rock and roll. To this end, some of these bands -- all of whom should be avoided; racists don’t deserve your money, even if they’re talented -- go to great lengths to avoid, say, riffs that a person might actually hear and respond to in an enthusiastic way, or rhythms that have a little bounce to them. Not so Horna (though I have to say that their politics might well be loathsome in the extreme and I wouldn’t know, since almost all of the lyrics and all the credits in the CD booklet are in Finnish): the almost-exclusively-minor chord progressions are catchy as hell, reminiscent of some of the great, unremembered Finnish hardcore bands of the early eighties. The drumming has a heavy thrash influence on Perima Vihassa Ja Verikostossa, leaning as heavily on the snare-crash combo as it does on the double-kickdrum, black metal’s meat-and-potatoes rhythm selection. The singer screams like Donald Duck gone uncontrollably mad with rage; the spare use of sound-effect is actually kind of spooky.
