Wolfspell Records, 2017
Genre: Black Metal
1. Lyöden taudein ja kirouskin
2. Uhrirovio
3. Pakanamalja
4. Alkemisti
5. Vihan temppeli
6. Tuhkasade
While I may have missed out on the Riivaus demo, I may as well just dive right in, because I have good news. The riffs are here. This debut full length is overflowing with some excellent and serious Black Metal riffing. Somehow another riff master has appeared on the Finnish Black Metal scene and it's always weird to see how this manages to keep going. But it does and while bands like Riivaus certainly aren't re-inventing the wheel here, I still wind up thoroughly enjoying the album and I'll probably listen to it often enough.
Riivaus is probably an amalgamation of all the great riffing bands in Finland. You certainly hear Horna as the mainstay style, but you get touches of Sargeist, Nekrokrist SS, Satanic Warmaster, Nattfog and I'm sure a thousand others that exist and can't recall at the moment. All of this makes for a wonderfully solid listen. In the booklet it says the album was recorded between 2014 to 2016, so obviously a lot of care and curation went into this music creation and I'm thankful for that. Sometimes bands just throw together an album and move onto the next riff, instead of writing a few riffs slowly over time to see if they can make something really special. It seems like Riivaus put time into the latter and it paid off with a good album where it doesn't feel like there is any filler riffs. Every song has a core catchiness that pulls the listener in immediately. Now the real challenge for this project is to see if they can pull this off again.
This is a highly recommended debut if you are a fan of the Finnish style of Black Metal. It really does have everything that draws us into that genre and for whatever reason I don't seem to be getting tired of this regardless of how many projects Finland produces.
