Catamenia - Morning Crimson (1999)

I have a great deal of appreciation for the first three Catamenia releases even though their music has never been overly complex or been tinged with a great deal of originality.

This Finnish band formed in '95 and released two demos before issuing their excellent debut, 'Halls of Frozen North' in '98, but it's their sophomore release, 'Morning Crimson' from '99 that I feel is truly an overlooked gem. Musically Catamenia is fairly straight forward semi-melodic black/death metal that moves at both a speedy and mid-pace with backing synthesizers quite similar to Dimmu Borgir and snarly raspy screams.

The typical Catamenia song is short (none of these 13 songs are over 4 mins.) with catchy riffs, no solos and plenty of synth enrichment either at the beginning of the song or consistently during each song and as I said its straight forward and pretty simple stuff, but its effective. The music seems to give off a very hate filled and energetic vibe through the harshly screamed vocals and the fast and well played drums and I've always found this to be a great record to throw on when I need to get a little bit of quick frustration out through music (the entire thing is just 40 mins.). The synths are highly atmospheric, cold and generally just otherworldly and for a lack of any other word, kind of purdy too. I totally adore Mika Tönning's screams too and always thought it was a bit of shame he didn't do much after they booted him from the band in '03. Of course it would have been nice if the rhythm section of the band had tossed a few solos in here, but with the average song being just 3 minutes I suppose its hard to fit much extra in there.

There's a lot of great songs on this record as well, especially, 'Aurora Borealis,' 'Talviyön Varjot,' '...and Winter Descends' and 'Beauty Embraced by the Night' are the true highlights for me, though I've always found the whole thing to be a pleasure.

During their fifteen years of existence the band has been highly prolific too by releasing no less than nine full-length albums, but they've also changed the music dramatically over the years by removing the keyboards, black metal influences and eventually nowadays sounding like a fairly standard melo death band, but unfortunately not a very interesting one. They've also had fifteen members come and go with the only original member being lead guitarist Riku Hopeakoski.

If you've heard some of the newer stuff and were put off by it then I highly suggest turning the clock back and checking out the bands first three albums, they are great!