Rippikoulu: Musta Seremonia (1993)
I don’t want to encourage this growing trend of reissuing everything and anything on vinyl -- even cassette tape demos!
But I couldn’t resist this fetching Svart Records pressing of Musta Seremonia, a six-track, 31-minute demo cut way back in 1993 by one of Finland’s first death metal bands to grunt lyrics in their native tongue, Rippikoulu.
Their moniker is the Finnish word for the Roman Catholic ritual of Confirmation, and indeed Rippikoulu’s music is rife with religious imagery, especially that pertaining to the Book of Revelation and its core themes of terrifying divine judgement and the end of mankind.
That explains the reissue’s cover art featuring Philip James de Loutherbourg’s The Vision of the White Horse (1798), showing the first two horsemen of the Apocalypse: the Conquerer, drawing his bow on a white steed, and War, riding a red horse and wielding a sword -- not pictured, Famine and Death.
Fair warning, though: this ain’t your easy-do-digest, “gateway” death metal à la Entombed, Obituary or Sepultura: it’s next-level brutality characterized by incredibly heavy, sludgy, down-tuned riffs, often played at a snail’s pace, with momentary bursts of blazing double kick drums and melodic counterpoints.
It’s Rippikoulu’s uncanny knack for interjecting these change-ups into quality offerings like “Kuolematon Totuus” (“Immortal Truth”) and “Ikuinen Piina” (“Eternal Torment”) that reveals their unfulfilled promise and suggests why they’ve not faded into forgetfulness, like most bands that never even managed to issue official product.
Ghostly vocals (sung by one Axa Mutanen) haunt the title track (which translates to “Black Ceremony”) and churchy synths augment “Pimeys Yllä Jumalan Maan” (“Darkness Over the Land of God”), whose particularly sluggish tempo almost moves it into the funeral doom category.
It’s close enough to connect Rippikoulu to fellow Fins and pioneers of that form like Thergothon and Skepticism, making it conceivable that these guys, too, might have evolved in that direction had tragedy not struck when lead guitarist Marko Henriksson passed away in 1995.
Rippikoulu was put on hold for the next few years and, despite a few comeback attempts, their momentum was lost and things never felt the same without Henriksson, so the remaining band finally went their separate ways, until a four-track EP called Ulvaja (once again sponsored by Svart) briefly reunited them in 2014.
Otherwise, Rippikoulu’s entire legacy (and resulting cult status) is found on Musta Seremonia and an even earlier ‘92 demo entitled Mutaation Aiheuttama Sisäinen Mätäneminenentails, but who knows if that will ever receive the posthumous vinyl treatment ... or if we want it to.
More Early Death Metal & Funeral Doom: Amorphis’ Tales from the Thousand Lakes, Carnage’s Dark Recollections, Death’s Leprosy, dISEMBOWELMENT’s Transcendence into the Peripheral, Dismember’s Like an Everflowing Stream, Entombed’s Clandestine, God Macabre’s The Winterlong, Immolation’s Dawn of Possession, Massacre’s From Beyond, Morgoth’s Resurrection Absurd, Necrophobic’s The Nocturnal Silence, Obituary’s The End Complete, Pestilence’s Consuming Impulse, Sentenced’s Amok, Sepultura’s Beneath the Remains, Skepticism’s Stormcrowfleet, Suffocation’s Effigy of the Forgotten, Thergothon’s Stream from the Heavens, Thorr's Hammer's Dommedagsnatt EP, Unleashed’s Where No Life Dwells.
