A decade ago Spirits And August Light was released. The making of this record in August-September 2002 had been so painful, including terrible mistakes (like the style of bullshit vocals in many of the songs) I thought would never be forgiven by myself, the audience or the other band members. The reviews finally came during the early Spring of 2003, with Kerrang! giving us 5/5 (the first Finnish band ever to receive that honour) etc. For so much wrong there must be something right?
I wasn't into metal anymore. But I had been called in, literally (a phone call in October 2000), to do this thing. One theme on the album is Minne, or "courtly love", as they named it in the Middle Ages. I guess the old saying about love enduring every hardship and suffering all wasn't invented out of nothing. I can't blame the musicians or the metal scene demanding low frequencies and demons to come out and play. Who is responsible for the heavy load of X.X.X.X that would make the spirit of this record shine so strange, with Amor gone crazy, too. And who felt afire.
Today I brought the old-and-broken disc (released by the late Rage of Achilles) down from the attic and put on my cd-player to give it a little spin. The guitar sounds are great, the riffs are well crafted and there is an epic atmosphere at times. But when the vocals are added, it becomes different. Maybe that was the recipe for the fine reviews and the reputation this record would slowly get. It was all because of human weakness and failure that it ended up sounding like this. Had we done what we were supposed to do, there would have been nice by-the-book ripping off. Had we succeeded in this, SAAL could have been a bombastic and fantastic one. Or maybe not. There were enough copycats in the business. And we had already made our own style and way with our power metal MCD Steal the Light the previous year. Why not continue doing something unique. After a maidenesque 5-piece it was time to give them a dirty piece of shit. Almost as if the band had changed to another. And this progress would continue on the next one, also. Years in Waste (2004) does have a sound of its own, and it is (not) the same band that made....
The lesson is, what makes an aesthetic work is the amount of love, even a small amount is enough to save the day in the end. You may not realize it at once, but it will get through to you as the years go by. The working title of SAAL was The Summer of Love, Rock N Roll & Death Metal, and we had plans to make a video with the drummer Jarmo Pikka wearing bahama shorts and drinking coctails in the sunshine, while me and Markus are driving around the streets of Kotka, looking cheesy and stupid, smiling like morons. That's the way it was meant to be in the note books. And when you look at the history of yesterday, that is how many bands would eventually make it. I can't say we invented this trend, but it was our idea and no one was doing it those times. I am talking about how things were in the so-called "death metal world" around 2002, for you to get it.
In the spirit(s) of August all kinds of things were getting involved. I have heard many bad boys and girls like SAAL because they think it's evil. It is good if they like it. Certainly there is evil ("with vocals that lift them out of any black metal pit", said the Almighty press). There is also good, although it's not so easy to see, especially if you do not want to see it. Like it is with so many of us.
And the fact is, despite a few raging reviews, no one was that interested in the band ten years ago. It would take a long time before SAAL actually hit the stores here in Finland. We were just losers who had failed to do a decent record. And I had carried a lot of shame for it all. Therefore, I almost quit the band in September-October 2002, because I really thought the failure was too much to bear. But in the end I could not let it be (like that). Slowly, the reputation of Spirits and August Light would become what it is nowadays. Where ever you may go, ti amo?