NO SHAME
In the dark days of January, No Shame gave out their fifth CD/LP White of Hope Turning Black after a total of four years of silence on the album front. During that quiet period, the band's expression has clearly gathered moodier, more mature elements and more thoughtful themes. The vocalist and frontman Sampsa Sarparanta, a painter by his other profession, has been leading No Shame into a darker but also more realistic direction both musically and visually. It has become the time even for the little beams of sunshine of Finnish punk to grow up now, in every positive sense of the word.
No Shame, founded originally in 1996, has gone a long way since their first recordings and their early "love punk" phase, but never succumbed to misery or despair. The manic gigs of this brilliant live band are, too, the very antithesis of hopelessness. This flag-bearer of honest punk rock cannot fail to disarm even the most hardened of cynics.
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