FRA DIABLO, A FINNISH MELODEATH SPECIALTY

I’m a big nerd for Scandinavian melodeath, so I was shocked to find out during a recent car ride with Metal Injection melodeath expert Frank Godla that there’s a top-notch band I’d yet to discover in the form of Finland’s SEO-unfriendly Diablo. Sez Frank of Diablo: “the sweetest band of this genre since Mors Principium Est.”

Their most recent album, 2008’s Icaros, contains all the best parts of melodic death metal without any of the genre trapping that have become so cliche over the past five or so years via a thousand 6-gen knockoffs. Best yet, they step things up a notch in the heaviness department and manage to distance themselves from the masses in part thanks to Rainer Nygård’s distinct, atypical vocals. If ever there were another example of Post-Swede, Diablo are it.

-VN