What, in fact, is a 'tramalizer'?  The assumption can made that it's something more than a tranquilizer, something a bit more menacing: an opiate that attaches to your brain, your spinal cord, your guts, blocking the messages to your brain that tell you you're in fucking pain. At least with a tranquilizer, you aren't being tricked- you're getting knocked the fuck out.  Tramadol allows you to wander through the world in a narcotic-induced fog.  The pain seems to be gone, but it's still there, and it's not going anywhere, lingering at the edges of your neurons, loitering in the long axons of your spinal cord, hiding behind the moistened cilia of your intestines.  Lose the addiction and the pain gets magnified tenfold: it's the anatomical equivalent of having "Fumes of Funeral Pyres" main-lined through your bloodstream.  Because Finnish death metal band TRAMALIZER's full-length debut is the sound of crushing reality coursing through every cell of your body.

"If you want your old school metal to be something more than just blastbeat after blastbeat and vocals something more than muddy growling," the guys write on their Bandcamp page, then "TRAMALIZER is the right poison."  It's an honest appraisal of the eleven songs these Finns have laid down on this slab of maniacal thrash. Take banger "Curse of the Lake Drag," for instance.  At five minutes and half, it's the longest song on the album. It goes through at least ten distinct changes- all taking us on the journey of being dragged across the bottom of a tepid, polluted lake in search of a bloated, gray body, another overdose victim or murdered soul. It starts off with the meditative sounds of oars passing through still water before collapsing into a metal-induced groove that breaks down after about 45 seconds to a head-banging drop.  The verses are sandwiched over some pretty wicked blast beats before the inevitable discovery.  The music abruptly drops to a whisper as keys come in.  It's the sound of the soul leaving the body- the point of view shifts from floating in the boat to that of a body tied to cinder blocks, lungs filled with filthy water. R. Travonen's vocals regress to a primordial vomit, coughing cumecs of liquid from his opiate-damaged lungs. M. Jokelainen's guitars bring the song to close with some impressive riffing as the song fades to a close and the body is finally brought to the surface. While "Curse of the Lake Drag" is the most ambitious and epic of the songs on the album, other songs simply wallow in the glorious middle of melodic thrash victory.  "Looking for Reality" starts off with an acoustic intro, like all great metal songs, before blasting into a classic, ripping late '80s thrash metal gallop. "Point of No Turning Back" includes a spoken word, sardonic plea over another head-banging romp and then pummels the listener with more thrashed out guitar bashing.

In the end, "Fumes of Funeral Pyres" is like another one of those white pills in the translucent orange bottles handed out by the pharmacists.  It's hard not to like, but you know it's going to do the exact same thing the other pills in the bottle do.  The challenge TRAMALIZER will face in the future is how to become the metallic opioid of choice amongst the millions of listeners ready to fall victim to heavy metal addiction.