Elenium

A Finnish festival of progressive death metal, Elenium’s debut opens with a head-bashing wallop, starting heavy before it ranges into more flighty territory. Holding back clean vocals to merely accent well articulated percussive growls, weaving analog-flavoured synth and a flutter of acoustic into a grinding slab of distorted guitars, For Giving — For Getting comes across as a tight and polished offering. I could do without the band’s taste for repetitive structures, the unrelenting pounding of several short motifs going a bit far at times. Once past that relatively minor flaw, the album is remarkably satisfying, Elenium wiping out nearly all memory of complaint with the perfection of tracks like "Nameless — Faceless” and their expectation-bending expertise.