Band : Millennia
Album title : The Hour Of Despair
Label : Casket Music – Copro Records
Distributor : PHD
Release date : 29/09/2008
Release : CD

When the local Metal scene in the surroundings of their town Loviisa (Finland, some 80 kms East from Helsinki) was starting to wane at the mid of the Nineties, a bunch of youngsters decided to start up their own band in 1996, and change things pro-actively!

After several changes necessary to create the tight bonds that exist today, the line-up settled in early 2006 to include lead singer Tuomas Pekkola, guitarists Mika Vonka & Marko Kankainen (the first also doing backing vocals), bassist Petri Peltonen, and drummer Are Virtanen. The stability immediately shed fruits in the form of the band's debut 4-track demo Burden, which was followed up in 2007 by the 3-tracked Broken Kingdom (I've also found trace of the existence of an additional 10-minute demo titled No More Orders, but was unable to find out more info about it).

With influences ranging from Black Sabbath and Kreator to Fear Factory, Earth Crisis, Sepultura, Pantera, Testament, Machine Head and even Killswitch Engage, you might be able to understand that the band plays a modern kind of Metal which fits in perfectly with the current NWoAHM and is a hybrid of mid to up paced Thrash and groove laden stuff. In fact, I suspect the guitars to have been somewhat down-tuned to add to that groove condition. The singer has a very nice Aggro-type kinda voice which goes very well with all the aggression going about, but there's also additional "clean" vocal passages and somewhat "growled" bits! The guitars intertwine nicely, putting in some occasional churning passages to boot! For your listening needs the band has posted their complete Broken Kingdom demo (all 3 songs also featured on the album) on their MySpace page (myspace.com/millenniaband), and added album opening and new track "The Blind Age". But the boys ain't just about aggression, and they bring a very nice and serenely calm instrumental (only acoustic guitar plus some keyboards) with the beautiful "Maverick". In all, the 10 tracks last a good 38 minutes. Not so much for the debut of a band which has had so long to develop...but then the current line-up's only been together for something more than two years!

90/100

Tony.