Whilst vanity projects are by no means an unusual thing in heavy metal, Endless Chain stand out amongst the raft of generally ill-fated projects funded by wide-eyed individuals with ‘more money than sense’, if only for the fact that they’ve made it to album number two and now appear to be a ‘proper’ band.

Built around relative newcomer Timo Mölsä, who came seemingly from nowhere to produce EC’s debut with the help of a largish selection of name guests from the Finnish metal World, the resultant album Forthcoming Past wasn’t an unpleasant start, even if it did lack a little cohesion and much punch in the songwriting stakes. New album Agony is thankfully a big improvement in every respect, with songs like We Are We going some of the way to realise Mölsä’s metallic ambition. Tuneful but always melancholic, the very Finnish sound the band cook up is pretty obvious, if truth be told, but that won’t stop you from indulging in a bit of headbanging every now and then as the album wends it’s way through ten resolutely pleasant tracks.

Burn Your Skies Above breaks the mould a little, and stands out consequently with it’s more ‘modern’ sounding arrangement and some nice vocals from ‘clean’ singer Ville Hovi, who plays off growler Aki Salonen very nicely.

Pleasingly, this is a band for whom the doom/death template doesn’t mean every song has to be a fifteen minute whinge-fest, with only one song, closer We Are All Vulnerable, clocking in at over seven minutes – and rather a good seven minutes at that. Consequently there’s a sense of urgency present sometimes lacking in albums of this style, a sense that it’s songs rather than processions of chest-crushing riffs that many listeners want. If the band can stay together and develop this policy together moving forward, then albums three and four could really start to see some dividends being reaped.

Agony is out now.