Finland’s Barren Earth first formed in an official capacity in the fall of 2007, a group of experienced musicians comprised of Mikko Kotamäki on vocals, Janne Perttilä and Sami Yli-Sirniö covering the guitar duties, keyboardist Kasper Mårtenson, bassist Olli-Pekka Laine and Marko Tarvonen on drums.

But the guys didn’t perform their material live for the first time until in February of this year.

“We didn’t really have any reason to play live because we didn’t have any releases, and we were busy arranging the music,” Laine says during a phone call from across the Atlantic. “For myself, personally, I thought that we should have it all together before we started to do gigs.”

Barren Earth released their first album together, the EP Our Twilight, in November of 2009. Now, just four months later, the band is scheduled to release their debut full-length album on this side of the mighty Atlantic on April 6.

But don’t expect them to bring the songs from Curse of the Red River [Peaceville Records, 2010] to these shores any time in the near future.

“We are not in a rush to tour. I think that, yeah, we’ll take things day by day. We’d rather do it well than fast,” Laine reveals, noting that with experience comes patience.

Plus, there are families and day jobs to take into consideration these days, not to mention their commitments to their respective other musical projects, and while Laine would like to bring Barren Earth to North America, it entirely depends on how the new album is perceived.

“It’ll reflect how many gigs we get or how many tours we’ll have, but it doesn’t matter anyhow because we have a goal: we already have started to compose new stuff, so if nothing happens we will go to the studio and make another album,” he laughs.

The band’s tour schedule is telling, though, with confirmed dates until the end of August, including the Summer Breeze Open Air Festival in Germany.

And the music itself speaks even louder.

The nine-track album is a well-crafted gem rich with layered atmospheric melodies, a progressive death metal masterpiece that, once you start listening to it, is impossible to switch off.

The creation of Barren Earth stemmed from Laine and Mårtenson’s previous work together in Amorphis.

“And we played together even before that, in the 1980s, and then we had a rock band. We played instrumental soft rock, like a really poppy progressive music,” he explains. “But we realize today that that band was the prototype for Barren Earth, because the songs we did were very similar. They were not death metal, but we could play them with Barren Earth, and I think we will arrange them into Barren Earth songs later on.”

That’s not to say the pair are the primary songwriters for the group. Laine did write four of the tracks on the upcoming Curse, but overall, he stresses that everything is extremely democratic.

“We all write songs; we all write music. We all compose together, and we are working as a band all the time.”

The chemistry is obvious, with each track sounding as though written by a single unit. It doesn’t hurt that band members were recruited based on their backgrounds and professionalism.

“In that way it has been a little bit easier than in previous projects. We all know what we should bring to the band and we don’t have to teach each other or learn how to play together, we already know, because when this band was formed we were looking for certain kinds of musicians.”

As it is, Kotamäki also has frontman duties with Swallow the Sun, while Perttilä and Tarvonen are still actively involved with Moonsorrow. Yli-Sirniö spends much of his time with Kreator and Waltari.

Still, the guys were focused on creating something unique with Barren Earth, and recorded a three-song demo that would later evolve into Our Twilight [Peaceville, 2009] and feature one new song from Curse of the Red River, which would act as the title of the EP.

“We didn’t plan on releasing an EP first,” Laine says when asked about the short four months between album releases. “It was Peaceville’s idea to have a teaser before releasing the album. Maybe because people didn’t really know about Barren Earth… I don’t think anybody knew about us before the EP came out.”

And now he’s fielding calls from Canada.

“Yeah, that’s right! At least you know about us already,” he laughs, and I promise to spread the word.

When it comes down to it though, Laine feels that featuring the song “Our Twilight” on both releases made for “a good transition from the album to the EP.”

And when it came to selecting the title for the full-length album, they again took a little advice from their label.

“We had three or four titles we could choose from, and it was Peaceville who suggested we should use Curse of the Red River because it suits the album, it ties it all together and especially the lyrics quite well,” he says, emphasizing the darkness of those lyrics.

“They are dark,” he chuckles, quickly adding, “But we are not angsty teenagers any longer. We were almost trying to go for a dark humour behind it.”

He’s also quick to say that it’s not a concept album, that “there is no theme to it there is no theme on the album, but Curse of the Red River ties every song together because it all deals with the lunacy of the human mind somehow.”

Dark humour, lunacy, and infectious death metal that’s complicated yet still accessible? I’m there. This is me, spreading the word.

You can order Curse of the Red River directly from Peaceville Records, or book your flight to Finland and get it from the band. Either way, it’s worth it.

[Editorial Note: There are a few Red Rivers the world over, but none so powerful as the Red River that flows north from the United States and cuts into the Canadian prairie landscape. Where it runs through the Red River Valley in Manitoba is a history of bloodshed that speaks volumes about where the darkness of the human mind can lead. Coincidence? Definitely. But it still resonates in this self-described history geek.]