BloodRose
Wywiad przeprowadził Bart Donarski
What a surprise! Another bunch of five in your face released via English Retribute Records. BloodRose come from Finland and explore aural territories commonly known as black metal. Thankfully the music we find on their debut entitled "Into Oblivion" is not trite. The Finns have the special gift to grab our attention by variety of song structures, desirable skillfulness and dozens of interesting ideas not solely contemporary black metal lacks of. I caught up with guitarist Teppo Jalkanen who answered to my questions with typical Finnish 'enthusiasm'. I don't know, maybe he hasn't been enough exposed on the artificial solar lamp they have here and there in Finland? Just kidding.To the best of my knowledge your are the very first black metal band in Retribute Records. Is that a vice or virtue of the agreement you sealed?
Teppo Jalkanen: "I had to consult Chris for this: BloodRose is the only black metal band on the Retribute roster at the moment, but that is a virtue as Retribute covers all areas of extreme music and so bands are exposed to people that a genre specific label couldn't expose them to. For instance, fans 
of death metal, sludge, doom, thrash etc. all visit the Retribute site and buy the releases, and so will be exposed to a black metal band as well, so the appeal is not limited to traditional black metal fans.
What term - black metal means for you as a musician?
"We don't care about the classifications or definitions of music. Black metal just typically happens to sound good, that's all. The term gives a hint of the musical intent of a black metal -characterized band, but in the end you'll have to hear the music your self to know what it truly is. So we thrive to write music that we think is good and do not worry about the pure definition of it."
Is there a slight or distinct difference between "Spectral Angels Symphony" and "Into Oblivion" as I haven't heard the demo.
"Spectral Angels Symphony (SAS) was recorded and mixed in four days where as Into Oblivion took four weeks to be finished. So although the songs of SAS are fully included in Into Oblivion they sound much better due to the more cultivated touch."
Is there any message within your music, or is this just sort of a story to tell?
"As can be found in one of the previous questions there is no ideology behind the lyrics. Self-destruction, death and misanthropy are some leading topics."
As I appears to reason Finnish metal cannot be dispensed with melody. What do you think, what might be a reason to this?
"(This is a tough one) We believe that melody is in the heritage of all Finnish music, not just metal. Music = melody."
"Into Oblivion" kind of reminds me of your country metes of Catamenia. I'm not trying to find fault with it, but the atmosphere seems to be akin. Your comment?
"To be honest, I hadn't heard of Catamenia before you mentioned it but now, that I've listened to a few of their songs I must say that we certainly do share some qualities in our music."
Bloodrose is rather a young band. Have you had got any live experiences so far? Any plans in the issue for the future?
"We've had a number of gigs with the name Hatework in the past and a few with BloodRose, but it is hard to obtain any gigs without a proper booking agency, which we are currently lacking."
Usage of keyboards in your music is more or less, but rather additional. Do you scheme to increase the key parts for albums to come?
"You are right about the keyboards. The older songs are mainly guitar leaded with keyboards added to make an atmospheric feel. But in the new songs that we are currently writing the keyboards will play a much dominant part."
For the last few years your band gone through several line-up replacements. Will the problem be eventually solved?
"Yes, there has been changes in the line-up and currently we have a vacancy for a bass player so that Jari could focus on the vocals more properly. There's just not too many suitable bass player candidates in a small town like Imatra."
As for a black metal band Bloodrose is a very skilled one. Ha! But being serious, I guess that for you the music is not about primitive fiddling only. You give an insight into technical aspect of the thing and I really appreciate that. How do you look upon it.
"The thing is, that you can not play (especially live!) fast black metal sort of music unless you have a solid technic. With all that information stuffed in a one second piece of the music you just have to play it timed so the listeners would have a clue what is happening there."
The production of "Into Oblivion" is vary good. Could you say a few words on the process of recording the album and so forth?
"It was a real pain in the ass at the studios. Our material wasn't fully ready and we had to make a lot of rearrangements and compromises on the way. A huge thanks goes to Miitri Aaltonen, the recording engineer, for putting it all together. The funny thing is that Miitri is not that much into metal (especially black!) and lives in the rock world, so he had a different approach to the whole thing and we had hard time to impress him with some of the fast drumming blasts on the way. On the contrary, he managed to impress us with stuff that we'd never come up to on the slow parts of some of the songs."
Any closing remarks on no particular topic?
"No."
Bart Donarski
