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Death/Doom messengers Rippikoulu aren't the only band in the Finnish underground Metal field that have chosen to perform in their native language. There have been a bunch of Finnish Metal bands performing in the Finnish language and there will certainly be more in the future.

Vainaja, a murky looking trio, is one of the newcomers performing their hybrid of corpse-heavy Death and Doom Metal in their native language. Most of the time Vainaja count on the reek of rotten and dark graveyards more than the metallic pounding of the bells of doom on their debut album, Kadotetut, which sounds pretty brutal and uncompromisingly heavy. They also try to spellbind us with an eerie, ghoulish and demonic aura in many of their songs. Slow, grinding and mercilessly brutal Death Metal is what they perform about 85% of the time, with the remaining 15% or so crossing over into the soil of Doom Metal.

Kadotetut has a great production and was mastered by Dan Swanö at Unisound. It has a lot of crispiness and crushing heaviness in the guitar sound that provides the backbone of Vainaja's wake-the-dead, along with The Preacherman's twisted, spine-chilling growls. Strangly, every time I listen to Kadotetut I think of Krypts, but with a tad slower, Doom-infested approach to their sound. Some musical similarities between these two Finnish acts are definitely to be found.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But never forgotten. Very much so indeed.