Diablo plumbs the innermost feelings of the Finnish people
Diablo’s music is filled with the essence of melancholic Finland. Booze and skiing with frost-bitten face and ice hanging from your beard are among themes which the metal group from Tampere draws from.
The crisp, melodic metal fires up the YleX Stage for Saturday, and the vocalist Rainer Nygård has his hands full with trying to wake up the dormant metal heads. Soon enough the crowds are cheering and bodies start to move to the beat of the rhytmic blasting.
The new album Icaros introduced faster and more straightforward Diablo, but the distinctive features such as Marko Utriainen’s airy guitar patterns and Heikki Malmberg’s focused machinegun-like drumming remain unchanged. Stern Nygård kept a tight grip on the audience with his comments (”How many of you men out there change their own tires?”) and his bewilderingly James Hetfield-like stage presence. The trio Nygård-Utriainen-Virtanen added fuel to fire and whipped the audience relentlessly, while the drummer Malmberg focused more on his tightly-woven rhythm patterns.
The crowd enjoyed the new songs with straightforward thrash rhythms and the half-tempo keynote blasting of the breakdown parts. There seemed to be no songs from the first two albums in the song list, but the people cared little. The band has reached a interesting turning point in its career with their new album, and the strong material there could possibly be the ticket to big foreign arenas - in addition to being a sure-fire path to excellent chart positions.
Text: Juha Aalto
Picture: Vesa Härkönen
Translation: Jari Rytkönen