North From Here: The Sentenced Story Book Released

As the death metal genre becomes buried under layers of history, the details of its creation gradually emerge, with the most recent being North From Here: The Sentenced Story by Matti Riekki, now available in English:

Founded in 1989, metal band Sentenced was a pioneer of Finnish heavy music. The band’s melancholy tunes had a universal appeal that spoke to audiences far further afield than just in their native North, with more than a million records sold worldwide. Over the course of their sixteen-year long career, Sentenced toured Europe and North America extensively. The band’s strong fanbase in Central Europe brought them to the clubs of Berlin and Dortmund again and again, as well as festivals such as Germany’s Rock Hard and the legendary Dynamo Open Air in the Netherlands. They roamed the edges of Europe from the London Astoria to Rome and Oslo, the latter two enshrined by the band as the consistent lowlights of their entire touring career. While the band mainly only toured the United States and Europe, their final farewell tour in 2005 brought them as far away from home as Moscow and Mexico City, where the fired-up crowd sang along to their material with such passion as to shake the foundations of both the venue and the band’s own resolve to retire.

The story of these Northern Ostrobothnian (anti)heroes takes them on a wild ride through early teenage bravado to ludicrously absurd and profoundly tragic twists of fate. Along the way you’ll learn their songwriting secrets, experience unforgettable shows and explore the deepest troughs of despair that is life on tour. Deathly disaster and Northern gallows humour; triumphs and squandered opportunities. These heavy-drinking, famously taciturn men in black tell the tale of what it was like to play in the band called Sentenced.

Tags: , , , ,

16 thoughts on “North From Here: The Sentenced Story Book Released”

  1. Gay R2D2 says:

    I love the collected editions of the old zines and stuff like Ekeroth’s book, but I can’t see this being remotely worth it. Maybe the first 50 pages will be interesting but the rest will be gayer than their music after 1991.

  2. Slavoj Žižek says:

    how about mefitis and ulcerate new album~

    1. Cynical says:

      The new Mefitis is the band’s worst work to date, and you’d have to be on drugs to want to listen to it.

      1. but the new ulcerate is the best of them, Dionysos-Dithyramben in 2020

      2. Lick me says:

        It’s amazing how Mefitis has people divided. Some people gush over the new album, others lambast it. It’s hard to tell if their trajectory will lead to anyplace substantial.

        1. DMU will be remaining silent on this album.

          1. Gay R2D2 says:

            Uhhhh…

            Why?

          2. Birkenhain says:

            Why though?

            1. Maybe we should make a list of potential reasons why, and you will see why stating any of them would promptly defeat the purpose behind selecting one?

              1. Conflict of interest
              2. Hates it
              3. Too fuckin’ lazy man (I got a quinoa salad and a three-foot bong)
              4. Ideological disagreement, although this has never been our bag
              5. The hookers hate it
              6. Thinks it’s just internet hype
              7. Thinks it belongs in a different genre
              8. Fear of legal liability
              9. Fear of outraging an internut army
              10. Some or all of the above + ran out of meth

              In every case here, giving you the reason gives you the review: “either I like it and can’t say, or I hate it and see no reason to speak on it.”

              There is only one missing case, and it relates to a sense of mission here. What is our mission?

              1. They don’t have “it”. You know “it” when you see “it”.

        2. Cynical says:

          How is it hard to tell? Previous works from the band had interesting ideas, marred by extreme impatience in the songwriting (the band had to sprint through ideas A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J, and never considered the connections between A and C or B and E, etc.) There was clear potential, but the songwriters badly needed to settle down. The new album is still mostly marred with the same flaw, but now every inch has to be filigreed to the point that overall melodic direction is hidden, a lot of the melodies are meaningless chromatic (or whole-step) twaddle for the sake of being “lol so weird!”, and there’s random explicitly demonstrative breaks such as the slam-poetry reading at the end of “Casing in Sediments”. The trajectory is clear — it’s heading right for the clogged toilet at your local Taco Cabana.

    2. Fckk Godl says:

      Ulcerate lol, the band with more albums than riffs… Review the new Helgrind instead.

      1. Gay R2D2 says:

        The Cuban Vikings?

        1. El poder blanco, mi nilla. Embrace it.

Comments are closed.

Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z