What was that? Did you get the number of the truck that hit me? Listening to Blood Sample is nearly akin to hearing music for the first time. Perhaps it would have been different had this not been my first introduction Waltari, a long active band from Finland. The music is all over the map, and it is all good.

They cover so much ground in their style that their style is almost all styles. The run the gamut from alt rock to hard rock, thrash metal to death metal. If it has rock or metal associated with it, Waltari has figured out a way to incorporate it into their music. The most amazing thing about it is, no matter where in the spectrum the song resides, it always sounds like the same band. Some bands can try to pull off the variety of styles that Waltari does, but they genrally sound confused.

OK, allow me to back up a bit. I have to say that when I first listened to Blood Sample, I did not have that bowled over/hit by a truck reaction. My response was more like "What is this? Doesn't sound all that good." But there is a story to that. I had recently come into possession of a larger group of metal albums, and I had set up a playlist to last me through the workday, setting up one album after the other. I did it alphabetically, so Waltari was at the far end of the spectrum, and since it was work, the volume was, let's say less than optimal for metal music listening. Anyway, after listening to a good 6+ hours of heavier metal music, this comes on, and it was a bit jarring which caused my confused and slightly negative reaction. The true reaction came when I was able to listen a bit closer at a more suitable volume. It was at this point that the truck came out of nowhere and introduced me to my new best friend, pavement.

Blood Sample is a musical journey through style. Waltari bends the conventions of genre and subgenre, combining a variety on one album, and in many cases in one song. To single out any one song would be doing them a disservice. Blood Sample is a journey, a rollercoaster, an onslaught of originality, and one of my most surprising finds of recent memory. Sure the band has been around since the 1980s, but this is my first experience with them, and it is definitely memorable.