Caskets Open - Concrete Realms Of Pain CD 2020

Doom from Helsinki, Finland

For 14 years, Finnish doom trio Caskets Open have written songs rife with strife and dark-souled riffs. Their fourth LP "Concrete Realms of Pain" emerged from the wasteland of a pandemic summer as the band's brooding masterwork. Bonded by a mutual love for this album, Seeing Red Records and Wise Blood Records have brought the songs stateside to celebrate this stunning doom achievement.

Their evocative compositions conjure the frailty of the crestfallen ballads of Type O Negative and Danzig. Meanwhile, there's also a simmering snarl of hardcore punk that raises a chalice to Peter Steele's Carnivore. Throughout the years, Caskets Open has warmed up the stage for bands as awesomely diverse as Church of Misery, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Primitive Man.

"Caskets Open are one of those bands that not only plays a throwback style, or in this case an odd amalgam of styles, they’re a band that feels throwback. The move towards busy composition and complex, layered production hasn’t effected these Finns. Each part of their sound is stripped to it’s essentials, each instrument given space to be irreducibly itself, including Timo Ketola’s vocals, which spend most of the album in clean, slightly affected territory a la Danzig, but occasionally cut loose in snarling hardcore shouts. The production on Concrete Realms of Pain is warm and full, with a mix that keeps the buzzing bass guitar lines clearly identifiable throughout."