Morphin’ Glory
Finnish progressive metal veterans Amorphis are 15 albums into a career like few others. As the band release Borderland, bassist Olli-Pekka Laine tells Prog, the nexus of death metal and neo-prog is a truly strange place to be.
Words: Joel McIver
Mighty ’Morphis, prog power rangers!
Images: Sam Jamsen
“When I first heard
In The Court Of The Crimson King
, it changed my life – literally! – because it was such mind-blowing stuff. It was catchy, it was beautiful, and yet it was still really complicated and progressive.”
A s anyone who has been to Finland will tell you, there’s no other country quite like it. Its native language has little in common with that of its neighbours Sweden and Russia; its topography is bizarre, with more than 180,000 lakes to fall into after too much liquorice vodka; and it’s the most heavy metal country per capita in the world.
“Why are we so metal? Actually, I’ve thought about this a lot,” says Olli-Pekka Laine, bassist with the Helsinki-based prog-metal sextet Amorphis. “Finland is such a metal country, I think, because most pop and rock bands never came here in the 70s and 80s. We’re a ferry trip away from Stockholm and it was time-consuming to come over to play here. But this didn’t bother the metal bands. They always came here, whether it was Iron Maiden or Kiss or Metallica, so there were lots of metal shows in Finland back then.”