If you want something heavy but not really extreme, medium to fast paced with plenty of life and movement, variations of guitar work, furious blasting drums and classic songs with occasional progressive passages, then Susperia’s “Cut from Stone” will give you an awful lot of pleasure. I’ve known about Susperia for some time and have a couple of their back catalogue, which I haven’t listened to for some time. Having heard “Cut from Stone”, I can’t understand why. The publicity tells us that “Cut from Stone” is a “collection of aggressive hard hitting metal with a melodic edge”. It’s a good description. Right from the first listen, I found the songs were accessible. There’s no attempt here to blind us here with some concept that we’re going to struggle to get. It’s just powerful and catchy metal from Norway. Yet it’s not simple or stereotyped, and each track develops fluently in its own way. On “Bound to Come,” there’s a striking and eerie backdrop providing a framework to a classic song. There’s always something interesting without being overdone or too clever for its own good. The core tracks are so good and headbangingly bouncy that moments like the haunting guitar pluckings on “Under” and “Cut from Stone” just serve to enhance and capture our attention and imagination. I cannot say there’s been a single moment when I haven’t been living this album since hearing it. Susperia succeed from beginning to end in holding on to a riff or passage to enable the listener to associate with it before moving on, none more so than on the captivating final track “Cut from Stone,” while maintaining all the time the melodic power and continuity. If I were to nominate a favourite track, it would be “Distant Memory”. This is the longest track at nearly seven minutes, which gives the time to explore the possibilities. It has a quiet acoustic beginning before exploding into a strong US style heavy rock/metal riff. The acoustic rhythm carries on in the background, adding a familiar and haunting feel, while the drum beat is ferocious and uncompromising. Midway through, the track seamlessly moves in a heavy progressive direction. It just gets bigger before ending quietly as it began. By way of additional information, the album was mixed by Daniel Bergstrand of In Flames and Soilwork fame. The Bergstrand/Susperia alliance has clearly been a healthy one as an extra aural dimension has been added to the Norwegians’ great technique and passion for well constructed metal songs. There can be no doubt of the pedigree of Susperia, with members from Old Man’s Child, Satyricon and Dimmu Borgir in their midst, but in case you were wondering, this is a band in its own right with its own aims. Whereas two earlier albums “Predominance” and “Vindication” that I know (there has been another one since called “Unlimited”) have similar levels of energy, and the blasting drums are out in force as here, “Cut from Stone” is more rounded and sophisticated, less prone to Black Metal chaos without losing any edge and it’s definitely tighter. It is a brilliant album.