"Death and DEF LEPPARD, death Leppard. The piña colada of death metal." No press officer would dare to write that line. The Finnish quintet that Markus Vanhala founded as a teenager had already built what it describes by the time he handed it to Tuonela Magazine on 18 December 2021, and Origin is the machine: a big block of death metal bolted into a muscle car frame, then coat after coat of candy lacquer sprayed over the body until the chrome throws the sun straight back into your eyes. You laugh. Then the engine catches, and the first riffs scorch the lacquer clean off the bonnet.
Cut at Sonic Pump Studios in Helsinki with Nino Laurenne and JC Halttunen at the desk, mixed by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street, produced by Vanhala himself and put on the street by Century Media on 5 November 2021, the ninth Omnium Gatherum album climbed to number five on the Finnish albums chart, one place short of The Burning Cold three years earlier. It nearly never left the garage. Between those two records half the crew walked out: Joonas Koto on guitar, Erkki Silvennoinen on bass, and finally the drummer, whose exit arrived, Vanhala told Dead Rhetoric on 4 November 2021, as "an email from them one week after a really good week of rehearsals."
So the chassis got rebuilt from the bolts up. Mikko Kivistö took the bass, Atte Pesonen took the drums, and Vanhala, now the sole guitarist on the sleeve, went at his own songbook with a cutting torch, as he told Dead Rhetoric in that same interview: "I basically threw half of the demos and threw them into the trash can." Ruthless. It paid off.
"Emergence" idles for two and a half minutes, guitar and keyboard melody and no voice, the engine ticking over in the driveway. Then "Prime" and "Paragon" drop the clutch. This is Gothenburg riffing with Aapo Koivisto's keys riding the top of every bar like a spoiler, Jukka Pelkonen's guttural bark straight down the middle, and on "Paragon" a chant of clean voices behind him built for a festival field. The label sent "Paragon" out first, on 27 August 2021, with a video of the band racing muscle cars across open tarmac while cheerleaders wave black flags from the back of an old convertible. You get the joke. You also get the hook, inside a minute.
"Reckoning" strips the paint and shows you the metal. Its video was shot in black and white on bare coastal rock above the sea, the band hammering away with nothing between them and the horizon, and the song earns that scenery: Pesonen nails it to the stone beat by beat, never rushing, never letting the keys float off with it. A drummer who hits like that buys a record a lot of lacquer. Vanhala himself counted it among the band's "bangers" in the same Tuonela interview, and he is right.
Then "Fortitude" changes down a gear, and the record finds its best road. Slower, sadder, the keyboards spread wide and a guitar melody hanging in the air long after the last chord has died, it is the one song here where the polish sounds like purpose. Pelkonen told Tuonela that its lyric is about "the massive strength one must build up to face the results of the risks taken or not taken in the past." Jari Heino filmed the band for it inside a timber house with a fire going in the hearth. The song burns just as slow.
Vanhala promised Dead Rhetoric "catchy choruses and more clean vocals than ever before in OG material," and he kept his word, which is exactly the trouble. Through the middle of the record the songs lock into one cruising speed, keyboards glazed over every bar, a growled verse handing the wheel to a sung hook, and the gloss goes on so thick that the riffs underneath stop biting. "Friction" bites back, a salvo of riffs with the keyboard hooks welded straight onto them, and "Tempest", which Pelkonen named among his own favourites from the whole catalogue, keeps the revs high. But a showroom car that never leaves second gear is still a showroom car.
But a showroom car that never leaves second gear is still a showroom car.
Two songs floor it. "Unity", the fourth video, released on the day the album came out and filmed by Heino among the amplifiers of a rehearsal room, opens on spacey keys and then turns the blast beats loose, the nearest thing to a full throttle run on the record. And "Solemn" takes the whole machine out onto the open road: almost nine minutes, section after section, heavy riffs folding into grand melody and Vanhala soloing like a man who has finally found the long straight. "I like those epic long songs a lot," he told Tuonela. It shows. The best song on Origin is the last one, and it is the one that sounds least like a sales pitch.
What rolls out of this garage is a gleaming machine with real horsepower under the bonnet and a driver who spends too long admiring the paintwork. Put "Fortitude", "Reckoning" and "Solemn" on at full volume and the old death metal engine is right there, rebuilt by a new crew from the half of the demos that escaped the trash can. Everything else is chrome, and the piña colada still burns a little on the way down.