This is what happens when you select your records to review based on the smart looks of the album cover only. And it is indeed a sublime piece of art glaring back at you from Magnadur‘s latest concoction.1
Other considerations surfaced as well, of course. Such as this band hitting the metal underground out of nowhere in 2024. And with two full-length records under their belt that same year, they concocted a third one – Beautiful Nightmare – this early 2025. The RMR crew saw similar action before, and it wasn’t pretty. So, what’s the deal here? Prolific artistic loins caught in a musical extinction-level event or simply genuine metal geekery on steroids? We’re all ears.
I am unsure if you ever explored the gruesome and annoyingly noxious underground of the early internet. Frightening corners of a unique multiverse of bits and bytes, containing useless tidbits of out-of-control creative experiments. Abominable creations throwing themselves at your psyche in perturbed and shrilly expressed vocal messages and frankly atrocious graphics to boot. And more often than you’d like, you get nightmarish and truly psychotic examples of plague-infested fever dreams that only the human brain can dredge up. Putrid experiments and revelations that could very well be true. Or could they? So, welcome to bedlam. This is exactly how Beautiful Nightmare sounds like. A piece of disjointed ghastly soundbites that will mercilessly ravage your ears for a very long 30 minutes of airtime.
In other words, Finnish mastermind Tomi Perrakowski hits the audience with an unhinged and feisty mix of Experimental and Psychedelic Metal, Noise, and a nightmarish version of the usually benign Synthwave. And the band will throw that hefty bag of sins at you like some sort of cluster bomb containing razor-sharp shards. All of that comes studded with badly executed ever-changing samples drunk on a bunch of half-baked ideas. But – what about those vocals? Well, a lot of gravelly rasps, croaks, some female wails, and Japanese monologues are over-present for sure. And a lot of that sounds as if the male vocalist just had an attack of Montezuma’s revenge with nowhere to go.
At this time, desperation started to reign over at the RMR Review Desk. This thing cannot be that bad, right? Perhaps, there’s outstanding guitar work? Somewhere, anywhere at all? After all, the commander-in-chief stated that this was some Melodic Death Metal. Right? Well, no. Beautiful Nightmare sports odd remnants of riffs and have-assed licks that trade places with weird ambient piano and acoustic guitar interludes caught in a murky ocean of miscellaneous elements. But Melodeath? A case of mistaken identity to be diplomatic.
As per the description of this allegedly august piece of musical regurgitation, the audience should be dazzled by Perrakowski‘s – and I quote – “…brilliant storytelling and genre-blending talents…”, stemming from “…a deeply personal and immersive experience.” Wow, let’s unpack that for a moment. There may be a story, true. But the RMR crew’s still waiting to be flattened by this brilliant onslaught of wordsmithing. Besides, most of the vocal parts are shredded into oblivion, so how on earth should one be able to make head or tail of the lyrics et al?
The genre-blending talents didn’t really unveil themselves to us, either. The record more feels like all genres hacked to pieces in a blender and the parts used for scraps. And that, in and by itself, is not necessarily bad. As to the personal part, the man got a point. Being the sole culprit at this master of the disaster show, there’s indeed nobody else. Yet, the immersion part’s probably governed by chunks of Xanax in one-gram servings. There’s more, of course, but let’s pause here to limit the damage some. This could go on forever, like.
So, ultimately, Beautiful Nightmare‘s performance can be described in very simple terms. The album art is a true 10/10, no contest. The sonic part – however – feels like a migraine on steroids, and you just lost your medication. Meaning, the musical performance on this record just hit rock bottom. The review desk could have gone lower but we didn’t want to issue a big fat zero. And perhaps we should have.
You see, it is great to have a boatful of loud and wild ideas that often garner some neatly executed action. But to never thoroughly follow through on any of them, leaves you with a disjointed mess of loose ends. Add to that a lackadaisical approach to songwriting and a questionable production. And you’ll find yourself en route to nowhere land. Oh, and as to the outstanding storytelling, we’re still looking for it.
Lastly, thumbing your nose at the audience will never do, and surely not on this zine. Thus, if you’d excuse me, I have more important records to attend to. Oh, and don’t ever come back here without having cleaned up this morass of atrocities somewhat fierce.
Ed’s note: Feel the need for more weird and pretty well-elaborated out-of-the-box songsmithing? Try this Norwegian act.
Record Rating: 2/10 | Label: Sliptrick Records | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 18 February 2025
- Should we do a top 3 for album art in 2025? Should we? -Ed.-↩