When the first riff on the album is an outrageous paean to The Trooper, you know that, if nothing else, Musta Kasi is the work of men with excellent taste.
Singing in their native Finnish is arguably the only risk Rotör take on their debut, but there’s something irresistibly exuberant and committed about the way they set about their flagrant exercises in NWOBHM worship. With a strong whiff of the proto-speed metal fury of Accept and Exciter and a dash of Thin Lizzy also present in the likes of Porttokirkko, this amounts to a brash and gritty love letter to the late 70s and early 80s, but with an endearingly eccentric edge that rescues everything from being perfunctory pastiche.
At their best, particularly on the snotty, rampaging sprint of Roottoripää, Rotör sound like some perverse hybrid of Iron Maiden and The Damned, replete with spiralling guitar harmonies, bellowed rent-a-rabble choruses and pummelling, street punk riffing of venerable vintage. If you dare to go double denim and have willing neck muscles, this is a guaranteed good time waiting to happen.
