Fire In The Brain

Description

The pioneers of euro metal, Oz, formed in Nakilla, a small Finnish town, in 1977. The band at the time consisted of Mark Ruffneck (real name Pekka Mark) on drums, singer Ape De Martini (Eero Hämäläinen), bassist Tauno Vajavaara, and guitarist Kario Elo. It took the four Finns five years to compose the tracks for their debut album, which became legendary, "Heavy Metal Heroes - Hey You". Buoyed by the success of this album, not only in Finland but across continental Europe, Oz decided to settle permanently in Stockholm, a much more significant city than Nakilla, in order to pursue a professional musical career. Their second album, "Fire In The Brain", was released in 1983. With energetic heavy metal anthems such as "Fortune", "Megalomaniac", and "Gambler", this album was even more striking than the band's first opus.In his "Heavy Metal Collector's Guide", Canadian journalist Martin Popoff gave it a rating of 9/10 and stated: "Fire In The Brain" is a dark and oppressive album, a deeply European work that relentlessly hammers the sounds, from the apocalyptic first stirrings of "Search Lights" to the slow and fateful progression of "Black Candles", right up to the violent screams of the eponymous track. "Fire In The Brain" received excellent reviews in the underground metal press (notably in the English magazine Metal Forces). In a special feature on heavy metal in Finland, published by the German magazine Rock Hard, drummer Pekka Mark concluded: "This is undoubtedly our most popular album. We were all living in Stockholm at the time, which allowed us to focus fully on the music." "Fire In The Brain" was distributed in many countries around the world; in Germany, it was available through RCA. Some magazines ranked it among the best albums of 1983 - a year that saw the release of many excellent records.