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Celebrate Finnish Independence Day 2011 With Their Metal Bands

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And now for something completely different 🙂

It’s without question that Finland has been delivering some seriously amazing Metal bands to the scene for the last few years and while there are numerous favorites among the fans, I have to cite that Nightwish was my first foray into their provisions.  I first heard of the band in 1999 and was not even doing my Metal Scribe thing yet but they remain one of my own personal top picks to this day.   From this point I began to look into some of their other groups such as Sonata Arctica, Finntroll and so on.  All of these wondrous sounds would come in handy to my mental musical palate once I began to write about it.  Since becoming the Master and Commander of the PiercingMetal universe I have attended a score of concerts that the Finns have brought to our shores and based on the coverage on the site have been fortunate to meet a lot of wonderful musicians from this faraway land.

Today this bountiful provider of Metal celebrates their 94th Independence Day and I just wanted to send them all a hearty “Happy Independence Day” and raise my glass with a very loud “Kippis”.   To celebrate the occasion I copied the tag for “Finnish Metal” which was used on every concert piece that features one of their bands.  Clicking the Finnish flag below will launch that search and you can enjoy the findings.  My hope is that most of you know all the bands already but if you do not, then it is high time to do a little research and eventual purchasing.  I am pretty sure you will like what you hear.   The core website can be searched for those bands via the main page.

Click The Flag To See "Finnish Metal" Postings

One day I will get myself over there and absorb a little more of their culture.  Having seen some of my friends photos and knowing there is even more cool music makes me pretty firm in this idea.  When I do that you can be rest assured that there will be both Metal and Personal blogs written up about the journey.  Of course I will need to learn a little Finnish but luckily I have Sammy The Ambassador to help me along in that regard. Stay tuned.

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PiercingMetal’s “Best Of” 2009: The Music Part 1

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Logo - The Best Of

I don’t think anyone is going to argue about 2009 going by like a train without brakes and yet here we are at the part of the year where we line out what we viewed to be “The Best” of the year in terms of albums, videos, concerts, events and books. We’ve aimed at making this a yearly thing and while it’s a lot of fun to share with you it’s also quite a bit of work; This is especially the case when you go way over a small list and keep on writing. With this this installment I’ll be offering up the albums that I got to listen to and liked the most out of the rest of them during the year. Sure we probably missed some that you are expecting to see here but you don’t get your hands on everything in this line of work no matter how you try. So sit back and relax and lets get to onto the main event.

The Best Albums Of 2009:

Mastodon “Crack The Skye” (Sire Records): Mastodon continually push their own musical envelope and this release finds them more a Progressive Psychedelic Rock outfit than a Metal band and the band’s following didn’t mind a bit based on the incredible music that was to be found on this one.

Epica “The Classical Conspiracy” (Nuclear Blast Records): Their 2nd effort for NB is this incredible concert experience that finds the band presenting mostly film score classics and then their greatest numbers with a full orchestra accompanying them. A wonderful experience and one that will impress the most difficult of fans – my hope is that this comes out on DVD sometime soon.

Heaven And Hell “The Devil You Know” (Rhino Entertainment): The most anticipated release for the first half of the year would be this new “Sabbath” album and it did not disappoint at all. Nice and heavy and loaded from beginning to end with solid Metal memories. Hoping this lineup hangs around a lot longer before pursuing other projects.

KISS “Sonic Boom” (KISS Records): Whether you support the fact that a couple of new faces wear familiar makeup or not, the band released a strong album and offered a great batch of extras with it to boot. The Wal-Mart exclusive nature of it made it a best seller that was actually a lot of fun.

The 69 Eyes “Back In Blood” (The End Records): Thanks to producer Matt Hyde The 69 Eyes were indeed back to raw Goth Hard Rock basics and moving on from the glitz they were steadily approaching. Lots of catchy stuff on this one and let’s hope this direction maintains course.
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