As much as I may dislike so many bands from the country, I think you'd be a fool to not put Finland just outside the top five most important countries when it comes to metal. Yeah they have nothing on their Scandinavian neighbors, Germany, US, or the originators of the style as a whole, UK, but like... they're right there. In terms of classic and innovative bands, who else besides those previous five are in the running? Japan, Brazil, Canada, and...? They may be a punchline at times for so utterly saturating their country with shitty corsetcore pop metal but that only really proliferated in the first place because they gave the world Nightwish, ya know? They pretty much have three entirely different subsects of melodeath that all spawned out of there, depending on whether we're talking about the style pioneered by Children of Bodom, Insomnium, or Wintersun, and if we mention that last one we can't leave out Ensiferum being one of the biggest folk metal bands ever. I haven't even touched on the more gothic stuff like Sentenced or whatever the fuck Amorphis is, or Reverend Bizarre with their very distinct brand of doom that also spawned legions of imitators. And if that's all too melodic and lightweight for you, they also have huge quality scenes for the more extreme subgenres like black metal (Sargeist, Horna, Satanic Warmaster, etc) and death metal (Demigod, Adramelech, Convulse, and of course, Demilich) as well.
It seems like the one and only area where Finland has always lagged behind has been thrash metal, and if you wonder why, just give a listen to Terrific Verdict.
I'm not gonna lie, the intro is probably going to be longer than the actual review here because this is so fucking boring and dumb that I had to distract myself by thinking of a dozen other bands before even getting to this one. At its core, Wheel of Fortune is just super basic bay-area styled thrash with nasally snarly vocals and precisely zero good riffs or hooks. Terrific Verdict are victims of the recent nostalgia craze where every old band that existed in the 80s thinks they have a shot at recapturing any glory they missed out on in the pre-internet era, and once again we have another band that left no footprint whatsoever during their initial run (only producing two demos) and came roaring back as a bunch of dudes in their 40s or 50s trying their best to channel their youth and instead just sounding like the metal version of a washed up pub band.
"Washed up" is really just the best way to describe how this sounds. All of these riffs and ideas are just shriveled husks of what could've been a decent mid-tier thrash release 30 years ago but instead are just clearly past their prime now. Like check out the first riff on "Too Late to Love or Hate". There's nothing wrong with that on its own. It's pretty basic, but it's quick and it moves well enough, but it just feels like it repeats a hundred times and then it turns out that almost every riff sounds like that one. They basically have two riffs throughout the whole album, that one and the main one on the title track. A fast one and a midpaced one, every fast and every midpaced riff sounds the more or less the same, and I just don't want to fucking listen to this boring, derivative, ultra-green shit anymore. Even the handful of bonus tracks of rerecorded songs from the demo era are lame, and I'm sure they actually smoked back in 1988 but thirty years later they're just neutered and uninteresting. Almost every song is like three minutes long and they all feel at least twice that just because they're so repetitive and bland.
Actually ya know what? Fuck it, I've listened to this thing twice now and I don't want to sit through it any longer. I'm just gonna cut this short and post it anyway because I want my headache to subside.
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