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National Napalm Syndicate (or just known as N.N.S. on their home turf) are one of the first Finnish Thrash Metal bands emerging from the first Speed/Thrash Metal boom that swept across the land of tens of thousands lakes, saunas and dorks, in the mid of 80s. They released their self-titled debut album in 1989, gaining a decent amount of success and reputation. Soon after that, a serious Death Metal boom hit Finland, killing most of the Finnish Speed and Thrash Metal bands and N.N.S. called it quits in 1991, to resurrect in 2002.

Since 2002, they have released three more albums with their latest, Time Is the Fire, showcasing 16 songs. This album was long in the making; it’s been nine years since their previous full-length album, Devolution of Species.

The album opens up with an intro called "Pig Moon Rising," which immediately brings King Diamond’s works to mind due to the haunting organ part s. After that, some familiar sounding riffs hit out of the speakers, making one realize, "Hey, this sounds like good ‘n’ old N.N.S. with a slightly modern twist": simple and to the point .

The band throw 16 songs at us, which is just a bit too much to wade through as the album offers nearly one hour of music. They should have split this for two separate albums instead. At the end of the day, we are talking about a Thrash Metal band here and Thrash Metal bands don’t just albums that last this long—not in my perfect world anyway, that’s for sure. Overall I like the vibe and the feeling of the album. What I don’t like is that they have also included a couple of Finnish-sung songs here; "Kuolema ("Death" in English)" and "Ken Tästä Käy Voi Kaiken Toivon Heittää (translating into English as "Who Passes Shall Lose His Hope")". For the Finnish-sung "Thrash Metal", we already have our Mokomas, Stam1nas, etc. so we’d better leave that shit for them instead, right? The Finnish-sung stuff sounds weird and just doesn’t fit them, plain and simple. When I heard these songs for the first time, I felt some impure blood mixed with a glass of pure water. Apart from those couple of "failures," I did enjoy this new outing quite a bit.