Album review: Mokoma – Myrsky

By DAN SOUTHALL

THE beauty of doing what I get to do here has always been the discovery of new music and bands from around the metal world. Mokoma are just such a band. Marketed as Finnish thrash, I would just call it modern metal – meaning it is fairly straight forward and perhaps a little generic.  This is an album I discovered on a recent trip that had me trawling through the new release section of an actual record store (remember those?) in a foreign-language country. I had to buy it based on an album cover that I thought looked cool.  The things I am prepared to do for you readers…

Searching around, I really couldn’t find much about Mokoma, other than the fact that they sing in their native tongue, are tagged as thrash as previously stated and have managed to be around in one form or another since the mid-nineties.  

Starting strong, “Joukkotuhoase” wastes little time establishing the band’s heavy credentials with a great riff and fast pace.  It doesn’t take long for the band to bring the strong opening down with some misplaced clean singing on the second track and a radio rock power ballad on the third track “Taivaan Tuuliin” that would have been better suited buried deeper in the middle of the album.

I suggest this mainly because by the time you get to the Soulfly-like “Pyha Vitutus”, the previous song has chipped away at the excitement that should have oozed out from an indigenous tribal-sounding track such as this.  So much so, I found myself skipping through tracks of a similar nature to stay interested in what the band had to show off.  And there is still great stuff here, such as “Malija Sille!” a deadest pit crossover rager –  although mostly it is one great track, one mediocre, one mixed bag and so on.

It’s unfortunate but sometimes you can hear why a band may not have broken through into the wider metal consciousness. Language is never a barrier to entry because there have been some brilliant non-English bands over the years.  But if the music doesn’t have the ability to move, then it will get ignored by all but a few.  I am glad I got to listen to this album and I may well go onto a streaming service and check more out. But from here this album could be trimmed of so much fat it would be a 20 minute EP.

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