I can still remember my first contact with the band's music. In Rock Hard magazine Germany, "North from here", the band's second album, was celebrated, and so I bought it in the Saturn Cologne at Hansaring (which, by the way, at that time in the distant year 1993 was considered - at least officially - the biggest CD selection in the world). I even remember that I also bought Sadist's "Above the light" and "The jilemnice occultist" by the Czechs from Masters Hammer.
Admittedly, despite all the musical quality, "North from here" did not become a permanent player in my CD player; Entombed, Unleashed, Grave, Morbid Angel and Death, for example, were more to my taste at the time with their more direct style. The new, fascinating second wave of black metal that was emerging at that time also caught a lot of my attention during my youth and adolescence. Interestingly enough, after all these decades I still remember that in a Rock-Hard interview the then singer Taneli Jarva was asked if the song title "My sky is darker than thine" was to be understood as a parody of the supposedly inauthentic dark aura of many black metal bands, which Jarva clearly denied.
The much more melodic "Amok" marked the band's departure from death metal and their commercial breakthrough, and they were also featured on VIVA's "Metalla" here in Germany. I didn't really follow the albums after that, except for "The Cold White Light", a very good, melancholic-dark album that you might not want to listen to if you've been dumped by your girlfriend or are going through other crises.
But for the reading pleasure it doesn't really matter if you are a die-hard Sentenced fan or not, and this is what makes good biographies. Of course, with the exception of Taneli Jarva, I wasn't that familiar with the names of the individual band members, so every now and then you get confused and have to double-check who is who.
Otherwise, you are richly rewarded with a band biography that delves deep into the soul of the band, as far as an outsider can, especially when you consider how silent the band members were.
In addition to the band's beginnings in Oulo, a short sociological outline describes the social conditions in Finland in the 1980s, where just being a member of a club could decide whether you belonged to the bourgeois camp or the "commies". A completely different time, when there was still the Soviet Union...
The recordings of the albums are described, at the beginning in Finland in the Tico-Tico Studios, later in the famous Woodhouse-Studios under the wings of Waldemar Sorychta, Century Media often sent their own bands like Tiamat, Samael and Moonspell to record there. Later they recorded in the Finnish Finnvox studios again. Even the described influences on the part of the management to improve their image seem almost grotesque in their description, manager Carsten Otterbach, known for his band Morgoth, unfortunately died in 2018 as a result of his MS disease.
Tours with bands like Bolt Thrower, Tiamat and Samael are mentioned. This also brought back some memories for me of some of these long repressed tour packages. Disagreements, but also friendships are described, paradoxically Sentenced got along very well with the Italians from Lacuna Coil, although they "probably talked as much in a month as we did in a lifetime", as a Sentenced member states. The initial dislike of Amorphis also turns into the opposite later on.
What runs like a thread through the book is the fact that touring probably broke the band in the long run. While the members generally tended to consume a lot of alcohol, the discomfort of being away from home for a long time, crammed into a tour bus, seems to have intensified the whole thing, so that in the end the negative spiral of frustration and excessive alcohol consumption was apparently unstoppable. The whole thing even went so far that some band members were half-seriously considering crashing so that shows could be cancelled due to a broken arm.
I think this can serve as a strong symbol for a band that was torn between its own desires and the demands of the music industry. In the end, the band always remained below their commercial potential, because excessive touring would have been the prerequisite (the same is described, by the way, in Paradise Lost's band biography "No Celebration", which is also very worth reading; the breakthrough in the USA was missed due to a lack of live presence there).
Who knows what spheres the band would have reached otherwise? A tour manager even dares to make a comparison with the possible success of a million-seller band like Slipknot...
But be it the lack of touring or the reluctance to face interview marathons, which every bigger band has to go through when releasing a new album, it becomes clear that the whole thing was a bit too big for the Finns, who preferred to keep to themselves on the tour bus and play Playstation instead of accepting the mating offers of young female fans.
The book also offers interesting subplots and anecdotes, even the notorious "Night Wolves" MC, who seems to be connected to the Putin government, was involved with the Finns during a performance in Russia.
In the end, the end of Sentenced seemed to be a liberation for all involved, the author compares it to the end of a toxic relationship. Unfortunately, as most who read these lines will know, the whole thing does not end according to the motto "all's well that ends well"; guitarist Miika Tenkula, only 35 years old, died in 2009 as a result of a heart defect, his excessive alcohol consumption will have accelerated the whole thing. Former tour manager Tuomas Tossavainen also died of a heart defect. The remaining former band members dedicate this book to both of them.
