Formed back in that fateful year of 1998 in Tampere Rock City by erstwhile members of Barathrum and Urn, Finland's Flame soon took on a (fiery) life of its own. A couple demos burst forth from the void before a split with the cult Devil Lee Rot in 2001; another demo came in 2004, followed the next year by a split with Australia's late/great Ghastly. But it was Flame's debut album, Into the Age of Fire, where the band's iron-fisted glory was fully revealed. Here, the band summoned forth triumphant epics of gnarliness that were equal parts ancient blackthrash and just-as-ancient bestial metal, all at a time when both idioms were far less fashionable than they are now. It would take six long years before another full-length torch was revealed, but Flame's second album, aptly titled March Into Firelands, proved that the Finns' unholy conflagration was as potent as ever: dynamic yet immediately headbanging, rooted in the old ways yet never recreating anyone's past glories...but then, silence once again.