{mosimage}The band from Kuopio features their third studio album, ready to devastate the stages during summer season.
Brutal vocals getting mixed with more melodic tunes, sharp guitars, hammering drums and explosive keyboards. Shade Empire is able to twist a bit more the black metal genre, achieving a difficult task, to sound commercial but still with a personal style. Harju´s voice is all what you can expect from a dark metal singer and more, if not, listen to the track Harvesters of Death where he gives an impressive lesson of how a death metal singer must perfom, and there is a sweet impression left from the skills of Rasane at the drums as well. Not without reason that the band ranked at the top 15 of the Finnish charts in the first days of the release of the album.
But all in all, Shade Empire faces the same advantages and problems than many of their “brothers” metal bands in Finland. On one hand an excellent audience in love with heavy metal open to the genre, and a wide circuit of concerts around Finland (for example, you can see them in the incoming Tuska festival), but on the other hand, a voracious competence not only with the international market, but also inside Finland´s scene, a place where during the last couple of years, when you kick a stone, you can find a dozen new metal bands.
Shade Empire sings in English, what makes it always more open to a wider international projection (and easier to understand for our readers). Zero Nexus is a good mature album that surely will fix the band´s position more firmly into wide Finnish metal scene.
Rating 4/5.