As a sinful and unrepentant person, I’ve grown used to the idea of perdition becoming my state of being after I trundle down the rollers into the Crematorium charnel pit, Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas blazing out over the Chapel of Rest’s creaky old PA system. In fact, after listening to Flames of Perdition, the new album from Finnish doomstrels Dawn of Solace, I’m quite looking forward to it…

…Because, quite frankly, if the music to be found on this new album is indeed the soundtrack to a tortured afterlife then count me in… Flames of Perdition is a nigh-on perfect exposition of mournful, melancholic latterday Finnish doom; you know the sort of thing I’m talking about. The title track is an epic slice of rousing, spine-tingling hard rock, taking in everyone from Amorphis to Omnium Gatherum or Swallow The Sun, but streamlining those influences into something sleeker altogether.

The death metal elements of this style have been almost totally excised from the equation, though the music is no less heavy for this reduction in raw power. Superbly recorded, Dawn of Solace have produced a vast-sounding record, a record where the heaviness is generated by the sheer weight of sound your’e confronted with. The title track, a slow-building epic based on some nice acoustic work from Tuomas Saukkonen, is an utterly massive sounding piece; when the electric guitars erupt behind Mikko Heikkilä‘s soaring vocal it’s a moment of pure spine-tingling majesty that you won’t soon forget.

Heikkilä gives a masterclass in emotive vocalisation throughout; his unvarnished, ‘normal’ tone surprisingly and somewhat incongrously carries a hint of Duran Duran‘s Simon Le Bon – and I mean that in a very good way indeed; but at the drop of a hat he is able to imbue this with bucketfuls of power or emotion as each song dictates, enabling each track to take flight in a variety of directions. When Saukkonen breaks into a superb chug midway through the otherwise quite stately Black Shores, the vocalist handles the change up in intensity without batting an eyelid. It’s mighty impressive stuff to listen to, let me tell you…

Whilst the market for this type of music is undeniably huge, it’s unlikely that DoS will make it out of the doom niche with Flame of Perdition, as they appear very happy to remain within the stylistic strictures of their chosen genre; breaking new ground clearly isn’t their thing. But that said, it’s equally unlikely that you’ll hear this album bettered any time soon, and as such it has to came as very highly recommended indeed to lovers of emotionally uplifting heavy metal.

Flames of Perdition releases on January 28th.