### Scorched Earth Tactics: Blastradius

#### 11/05/05 || Lord K Philipson

My infamous review of Nightwish’s latest piece of cock-cheese must really have made Finland aware of this lovely website since we nowadays get quite an amount of albums sent from there. None of them sound even close to Nightwish though. Thank you.

Scorched Earth Tactics ( I have no idea why, but I love that name) decided to send over their latest EP, and I guess a “thanx” is in order. SET are cool. Not cool like George Clooney-cool, but still cool. At first I was not sure what to think about this since it sounded a bit too out of place here and there for my liking, but after a few listens I kind of get what these fucks are doing. It might be risky to throw in too many different styles into the mix (if you are not The Project Hate that is) if you wanna make a good and sensible impact on people. Despite this, SET succeeds with keeping it metal enough though, even if the weird riffs and passages at times might throw you off.

At one point you have blastbeats bursting out of the stereo (complete with a pretty weird production overall), just to have that changed to some weird instrumental-extravaganza the next. To an un-trained ear this might be just a tad too much to comprehend at first but it kind of makes sense after a while, no matter how weird that may sound. I guess you could say SET makes pretty interesting music which is nothing short of original in the end. Some parts reminds me of Slipknot’s guitar-technique (weird noises and fuck-all tones) without sounding Slipknot at all as a whole.

Other parts are semi- black metal-ish without the trademark of black metal vocals, or for the sake of being black metal at all. Besides that we got some half-tehnical deathmetal going on with weird guitar harmonies layered all over it. It’s weird but it kind of works in the long run. With a better production this would be even more interesting to listen to. I look forward to hearing more from this band, hopefully next time around they’ll throw up some more groovy riffing into the mix instead of concentrating solely on being weird.

And nope, I won’t rate EP’s.

- Information
- Released: 2005
- Label: Self-released
- Website: www.scorched.org
- Band
- Erkki Hätinen: vocals
- Tero Rinne: guitas, backingvocals
- Tom Gardiner: leadguitars
- Hannu Lakervi: bass
- Antti Viidanoja: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Lambs
- 02. Defiance
- 03. Futile struggle
- 04. Italian strike
- 05. Blastradius