What a gloomy place Finland must be to produce so much doom metal. While you’ve likely encountered the doom giants Lord Vicar, Spiritus Mortis, or Reverend Bizarre in your travels, it is within the murky depths of the Finnish doom underground that you might stumble upon Helsinki-based Cardinals Folly. The band’s press loves to point out their status as an underground band, which feels strange. Then again, frontman/bassist Count Karnstein (Mikko Kääriäinen) likes to lay it on thick with the occult, and occultism is rather at home in the dark corners of the underground. Now, Helsinki’s deranged pagan sons have emerged once more with Live By The Sword. With this album, Cardinals Folly promises to descend upon you with sermons of the occult and the bizarre, an unholy scripture of Lovecraftian depravity and pagan mystique…
…or so Cardinals Folly would have you believe. Despite the strong aesthetic potential, doom lives or dies on The Riff, and the bulk of what Live by the Sword offers is forgettable. Cardinals Folly have always played traditional, capital-D Doom Metal, and there are notes of an underlying NWoBHM flavor in Live by the Sword. Think Reverend Bizarre meets Iron Maiden. Fuzz addicts might be put off by the much cleaner production than doom tends to receive, yet the distinctly audible tone works for this high-energy version, even if the music itself falls short. It’s surprising that after nearly 20 years in the game, Cardinals Folly seem to struggle with writing strong riffs that really grab hold of you. The first full track “Ride or Die 666” is an aggressive song that suffers from melodically uninteresting riffs driven into the ground by repetition. Little stands out as distinct or engaging, and by the end, it’s a struggle to recall much of what you’ve just heard—a pattern that will become increasingly commonplace as the album goes on.
What stands out the most are the vocals of Count Karnstein, and not in a good way. His hammy theatricality is reminiscent of the vocalist from The Wandering Midget, but it feels incongruous with the heavier music here. Many of the vocal decisions hurt the album; the brief yet glaring harsh vocals in “Ride or Die 666” and “Innsmouth Royalty” feel both hollow and out of place. Karnstein’s tendency to punctuate vocal lines with a growl all across the album is misguided; it always sounds awkward and takes the listener out of the song. As the singing hits a higher range, the vocal delivery weakens. Notes are frequently lost in the chorus of “Priesthood of Darkness” and “Ludovico,” and Karnstein’s voice consistently sounds strained in an attempt to maintain the intensity of “Innsmouth Royalty” and “Ludovico.” In a word, Count Karnstein’s vocals are distracting; one could liken them to an actor miscast in a role, deflating the impact of the overall experience.
The issues on Live by the Sword coalesce into an album that can feel difficult to listen to all the way through. There are some highlights: “Luciferian” is a fairly catchy rock n’ roll jam, and the epic doom of “Priesthood of Darkness” is a welcome change, especially when it shifts into overdrive. However, these are songs I like despite the vocals, and their dynamic edge is wasted by being placed next to each other in the first half, rather than spread out. As the latter half of the album drags on, the musical stagnation begins to feel lethal. “Innsmouth Royalty” wears you down with more inconsistent vocals and aggressive riffs that are overplayed into redundancy, followed by the title track that struggles to keep my attention with riffs that are hard to tell apart. It’s easy to feel checked out by this point, and some forthcoming solid moments—a harmonically satisfying outro in “Ludovico,” an excellent guitar solo in “Last Bastions of Doom”—end up blending into the greater slog of Live by the Sword.
Despite everything, I’m rooting for these Finnish doomsters, for no better reason than that it’s obvious they’re having a blast playing their eeeeevil doom metal. The marketing surrounding Cardinals Folly boasts how they’ve lurked in the Finnish metal underground for ages, but I would like to see them succeed. Unfortunately, the combination of forgettable songwriting, poor album arrangement, and a vocal performance that needs work is one that will likely see this unholy congregation remain in the crypts.
Rating: 1.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed:
Label: Soulseller Records
Websites: cardinalsfolly.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/cardinalsfolly
Releases Worldwide: October 27th, 2023
