Withering

The Withering saga began in the fall of 1999. Raimo and I had an idea about a band, and we started looking for a guitarist to complete the line-up. We wanted to start a band, which has majestic Finnish melodies, but at the same time, uncompromisingly brutal. With Mika's joining, we became a complete, focused unit. We played a lot of covers from bands like Amorphis, Paradise Lost and Sentenced starting out, and those groups eventually became our major influences, once we started to write our own material. Our first demo, The Signs Of Betrayal was recorded in January of 2001. These recording sessions were basically used for training us to work in studio conditions. A year later, we entered the Tico-Tico studio with Ahti Kortelainen, and we recorded our second demo, "Justification for Unavoidable", which really started to sound like the music we were striving to produce. As far as the Gospel of Madness is concerned, I honestly think that it truly represents Withering at it's current full potential. We put our souls into this in order to create an album which would bring back the early 90s melodic death metal vibes, while looking to the future, and are within ourselves satisfied with the result. After recording our two previous demos with a mixture of clean/growling vocal styles, with this release, we decided to focus on the more aggressive aspects of our music. This new focus on aggression prompted us to write songs geared more for death vocals than melodic ones.