along comes Finland's Cantata Sangui -- a heavy metal band with no guitar players! "Heresy!" you screech, slamming shut the lid to your casket for emphasis, and indeed horror and disbelief seem like the only reasonable responses until one is exposed to the surprisingly effective, severely overdriven, and reassuringly loud six-string placebo propagated by five-stringer Tuomas Tunturituuli and four-stringer Juha Vilhunen (who replaced longtime member Mika A.A. Hyytinen in 2008). Completed by lead singer Anna Pienimäki, male vocalist Kari Husa, keyboard/samples player Hanna Sirola, and drummer Black Bolton (who dresses only in blinding white, for contrast with his ebony-attired bandmates), Cantata Sangui began taking shape as early as 1998, but recorded only demos over the next decade because all involved were generally busy with other band pursuits (especially Enochian Crescent members Turituuli and Bolton). Then, in 2009, the group finally forged a deal with Season of Mist Records and proceeded to record its almost disconcertingly "different" debut album, On Rituals and Correspondence in Constructed Realities, featuring an avant-garde mixture of doom, gothic, black, and progressive heavy metal, made all the more unique by the absence of guitars. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia