Music For Nations

My musical meanderings often seem to take me to the more obscure corners of Youtube searching out new and unchartered territory. Over the past year I have been fascinated by a genre of music that goes under the title of Folk-Metal : essentially music that combines elements of traditional folk music with Heavy Metal. It sounds like one of the most bizarre musical marriages but I think it actually works in a big way.

I’ve been a fan of the more traditional Folk-Rock blend for years – this is a fairly broad label that covers acts like Pentangle and Fairport Convention, through the likes of Lindisfarne and Jethro Tull and even on to more hard rock orientated acts like Led Zeppelin and Thin Lizzy. The latter are interesting as they incorporated melodies and lyrical ideas from Irish music into what was essentially a full-on hard rock act – not exactly a stones throw away from later Folk-Metal acts like Newcastle’s Skyclad.

What really inspired me to poke around the whole Folk-Metal scene was bumping into a video by Russian Folk-Metal band Arkona. They play a rather extreme form of (essentially) Death Metal with the machine gun drumming, massively overdriven guitars and death growl vocals. However, this is mixed with traditional, often medieval instruments and taking melodic inspiration from traditional Slavic music, all sung in Russian. The mix is infectious and they do vary their sound from extreme metal down to traditional folk arrangements all of this mixed in with lyrics harking back to Russia's pagan past.

I think what really makes Arkona stand out is that they embrace their own national music style, including singing in their native tongue. This really stands apart from the mainstream of popular music which more or less states that all songs must be sung in English, creating a rather dull monoculture of sound-alike artists. Moving rather closer to home I came across Týr from the Faroe Islands. They sing partly in English and partly in their native Faeroese and take their musical inspiration from traditional Scandinavian music with lyrics inspired by beer, blades, battle, butchery and various other activities which gave Vikings a rather poor reputation in the first place. Unlike Arkona, Týr don’t use traditional instruments in their music but rely on the standard drums-bass-guitar line up of hard rock music. However the traditional melodies and Faeroese language make them stand apart:

Finland has a great tradition of producing left-field music - this is the country that won the Eurovision song contest with a bunch of monsters. They have produced another such group in the form of Finntroll. They combine heavy metal with Humppa – a sort of frenetic Finnish dance music derived from early 20th century jazz. They actually sing in Swedish (I believe) rather than Finnish (which is linguistically quite different and more closely related to Klingon) and turn out music which is both ferocious and comic.
 I’m not sure quite how seriously to take Finntroll (not very) but just down the road in Perth we have Alestorm who play what they describe as “True Scottish Pirate Metal”. They play very much with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks but what they have done musically is actually quite clever – they have incorporated melodic elements of sea shanties into a comic metal mix. Oh the joy of being this drunk.

what ties all of these acts is music that is from nations – rather than conforming to a single corporate standard for of popular music they have taken folk music back from fusty, Arran sweatered killjoys singing miserably with one finger planted firmly in ear in the name of authenticity and given centuries old musical traditions a very welcome 21st Century twist. Now we just need Arkona to enter Eurovision.