Following on from 2021’s Origin, Finnish melodeath act Omnium Gatherum have gained a sixth member in former Arch Enemy guitarist Nick Cordle and recorded Slasher (Century Media), a thunderous four-track EP which plays directly to the band’s many strengths.

Opening with the title track, this twenty-minute interim release gets off flying with jagged, fast-paced riffing and frontman Jukka Pelkonen‘s familiar guttural roars. Mikko Kivistö‘s bass sits nice and high in the mix while Aapo Koivisto‘s keyboards remain in the background until the chorus when Pelkonen adds melancholic clean tones and the song changes personality almost in the blink of an eye.

A huge hit in the 1980s thanks to dancing welder movie Flashdance, Michael Sembello‘s ‘Maniac’ gets the cover version treatment here. Written by Philadelphia composer Dennis Matkosky after watching a news report about a serial killer (as well as William Lustig‘s controversial 1981 slasher flick of the same name) the song originally included lyrics like “He’s a maniac, he just moved in next door. He’ll kill your cat and nail it to the floor”. An amusing choice of song for sure, the band’s aggressive style definitely works, especially during Markus Vanhala’s superb guitar solo section, although the outright absence of any clean vocals on a song like this might come as a surprise to some.

Drummer Atte Pesonen ensures ‘Sacred’ opens with a lively intro, the song quickly hitting an uptempo groove while the darker, more aggressive parts are offset with subtle keyboards and some great guitar hooks. Meanwhile, the closing cut ‘Lovelorn’ possesses a laid-back eighties commercial metal groove which sounds like something Whitesnake could have written if David Coverdale had been raised on European death metal.

With reliably solid musicianship, weighty riffs, and a fun cover, Slasher is a hugely enjoyable twenty minutes of melodic death metal and an intriguing taster of what is yet to come from a band still at the top of their game.

Buy the EP here:

https://omnium-gatherum.lnk.to/Slasher-EPID

7 / 10

GARY ALCOCK