Didn’t we tell these guys to stay off our feed and not return? After this Beautiful Nightmare, Magnadur was good for the scrapyard. So, we turned the page and moved on. A waste of space in our music library. At least, this is what this crew thought.
Because, lo and behold, another manic piece of this Perrakoski dude threw itself into our feed. And that burning sensation brought about unfinished business with this band. It ain’t smart to mess with the geezers at the review desk over at the RMR office tower. Never, ever.1 So, here we go with the start of our brand-new column called ‘Visiting Past Sins’. Or something.
Magnadur‘s newest maelstrom of feculence, called Punishment of Hamlet, just hit our eardrums with a vengeance. A record garnished with a cover that looks almost amateurish in appearance. Compared to the former regurgitation of the weird and terrible, that is. And what does that title mean anyway? Hamlet in the afterlife? Divine justice duly dispensed by the almighty powers that be? Last time I checked, they all kinda killed themselves in a happy carousel of a melodramatic poison bonanza.2
As the overused saying goes, a leopard won’t change its spots. So, brace yerselves and don yer body armor. Because that wild tornado of miscellaneous and misguided soundbites will continue in full force for yet another very long 29 minutes of – airplay? The RMR crew is at a loss as to what to call the delivery of this bag of dicks here.
In other words, Punishment of Hamlet will treat you to yet another mighty slice of this pulsating nonsense that the artist exposed us to much earlier in the year. An undying thirst to experiment and supposed manic-depressive instances of anal retention seem to drive the artist to new heights to search for the top of this mountain of madness. You see, Beautiful Nightmare had at least some class compared to this hitpiece here. At least some licks that seemed to be artfully constructed made their appearance here and there. Yet this Hamlet ‘thing’ is just a collection of wobbly soundbites from whatever fever dream went through the artist’s mind. It gleefully descends into some unknown catacomb of the mind to spawn this madhouse mixture of crazed piano stunts, artlessly ravaged riffs, and drums destroyed seemingly by some greenish goblin with a Jedi syndrome.
There is no messaging here, no discernible theme other than the absurd title, Punishment of Hamlet. The RMR crew found no recall to anything that could give anyone but the author a hint of where this story is hurtling toward. Of course, with none of the vocals outside of rasps, growls, or the ubiquitous distorted demonized vox, this is beyond the Tower of Babylon.3 You just won’t be able to make out any syllable to even beat some remote sense into this noisy ruckus.
So, where does this leave us? Actually, nowhere. Punishment of Hamlet is neither progress nor regression. It just continues where its predecessor left off. A whirlwind of migraine-inducing, disconnected sound elements, shredded to pieces and rearranged helter-skelter. The whole shebang is garnished by a very last track called Finnish Sauna, for some reason. This particular blurb gave us no hint or closure. Instead, it turned to be as enigmatic as it was confusing. Hamlet was – as the saga goes – from Denmark, so Finland ain’t all that far away. But just how a sauna in Finland connects to a 15th-century Danish imaginary figure created by the late Mad Bill did – again – not divulge itself to us.
Well, perhaps the sauna was just too hot for everyone, and the culprit(s) responsible for this three-ring circus stayed too long in its volcanic heat. So on they sweated, until the aforementioned fever dreams seriously wrecked things. And wreck they did them for good, yet again.
Ed’s note: Visibly, this did not work too well. So, why not meet a master of the extreme and bizarre, beset with frightening electronica with a metallic twist? Enter the Bunker.
Record Rating: 1/10 | Label: Metal Madness Studios | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 10 June 2025