Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Domination is not just measured in output but in years also. The Scandinavian block has over the course of the last few years become a power house, an energising animal with seemingly just one point to make and that is to prove time and time again that this decade is about those set of countries providing the very best Heavy Metal music anywhere in the world. In Finland’s Battle Beast the trend continues and in their latest stormer of an album, Unholy Saviour, it’s easy to see why.

A few years down the line since the combat lines were drawn, it still seems surreal to the British fan of the genre that any country would dare try to take on the mantle of having the finest groups outside of the U.K., perhaps America deservedly thought so for many years with groups such as Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax for example, but as the wheel inevitably turns, so does taste and whilst Britain and North America seems to have fallen in love once more with its traditional musical output, namely country, blues and folk, its full speed ahead for Scandinavia and to the lover of such things, that is more than alright, it positively reeks of enjoyment.

Unholy Saviour is not just a fighting redeemer, it gathers up the helpless, the ill-informed and the strident anti-crusaders and places them into a neat pile before blowing them away with verve and more musical muscle and vocal dexterity than a lion being freed from a cage in a zoo and roaring its approval at the kindness shown in the action of drawing back a bolt.

In Noora louhimo, the lioness of Finish brawn, the vocals on the album sit somewhere in the realm of Helloween’s Kai Hansen. On songs such as the opener Lionheart, the brilliant I Want The World …And Everything In It, Touch In The Night and Far Far Away, the vocals are intriguing, they lull you in with the serenity of angel fighting back tears but one armed with a sword if you disappoint her.

Even in the instrumental Hero’s Quest, the band really set the scene and guitarist Anton Kabane, Juuso Soinio, Pyry Vikki, Eero Sipila and Janne  Björkroth combine to make a summer’s breeze lazily stirring the green grass on a meadow, spring to life as if hit by a mile wide tornado.

Sometimes you just have to thank someone for producing a set of great songs in which to listen to, the Unholy Saviour may as well take the credit as anyone. Crushing and relentless, Battle Beast’s Unholy Saviour is a credit to the genre.

Ian D. Hall