Review Summary: Imperanon’s lone release is a weak album that nonetheless revealed some potential.
Some have opined that Imperanon followed Children of Bodom and their musical cousins in the ‘power metal plus harsh vocals’ genre. Those people are wrong. True, Imperanon were a Finnish five-piece with a propensity for sweep-picking and keyboard solos, but I maintain that anyone who enjoys Bodom and their kind for the right reasons will not find much to esteem here. In short, Imperanon never quite learned that distortion, speed, and mastering church modes do not guarantee intense nor interesting music.
Stained is too amateur of an album to deserve any serious recognition, and the band’s lack of album-titling creativity mirrors their low level of musical originality. The production sounds muddled and the songs lack flare and enthusiasm of any kind. Meaning: no accents, syncopation, or structural variety to speak of. In most cases, as becomes obvious with the first 30 seconds of “Blade”, the melodies sound as if they were ripped straight from a guitar instructional book or worse, a DVD. The slower tracks – like the title track, for instance – are potentially sleep-inducing, largely because they resemble the other songs in every other way. To the degree that they slow the tempo, they lose what little attraction they had. And plaguing the entire album is a flat guitar tone and flatter, unexpressive guitar playing; the leads lack vibrato and the chord changes appear arbitrarily chosen.
Still, there’s a bit of a silver lining on this album, in the form of one excellent track and a handful of noteworthy riffs peppering the other songs. The melody of “Shadowsouls” is infectious, and commendably sweep-picked. Usually these sorts of things strike me as cheesy, but the guest female vocals work surprisingly well, trading off with the Aleksi Sihvonen’s standard bark. These elements coalesce into a memorable and repeatable track. As for the disc’s other positives, “The End” contains an uplifting and driving theme, fulfilling the power metal side of their chosen genre. “Memories to Dust” marks the second most successful song on here, but the cookie-cutter percussion (common to the whole album, let it be noted) makes it an underachiever. Finally, “Rhythm of Pain”’s verse proves that they’re at least capable of writing a more nuanced rhythm part than power chords in sixteenth notes.
I hypothesize that these guys needed some more seasoning, and maybe some more cash for production. After all, three of their members participated in bigger (and better) things – see Wintersun, Norther, and Finntroll. Still, their work as Imperanon remains a reminder of what happens when one takes the melodic focus out of metal and fails to fill the void with other musical devices: a mechanical and repetitive collection that only seems to do right by luck or accident.
