October Music Series: Slartibartfass – Tanz der Kobolde

Posted on October 26, 2012 by necromoonyeti

From the perspective of a guy who doesn’t speak a word of German, this has to be the second greatest band name ever after Helfahrt. But then, “Slartibartfass” apparently refers to a fictional character with an intentionally absurd name. To the best of my knowledge Helfahrt is a legitimate false cognate. HELFAHRT!

This is not Helfahrt. This is Slartibartfass, who paint a delightful vision of super-cute munchkins tying you up in your sleep and harvesting your kidneys. Tanz der Kobolde makes no pretense to anything more than what its name suggests. The death metal vocals are deliciously hokey (the only sort of context in which I actually like death metal vocals), and yes, the drummer is simulating stomping gremlin feet.

Kobolds are little Germanic sprites, typically invisible and inhabiting homes, caves, and ships. They’re fairly ambivalent little fellows. Some will do household chores for a pittance, and they say if you stab one to death it can drop gold. When annoyed by their human cohabitants they tend towards dismemberment. They don’t much care for clothing. The element cobalt is named after them; they often give it, laden with arsenic, to miners as a playful prank.

Slartybutt are from the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany. Tanz der Kobolde appears on their first album, Nordwind, released in 2006. It is definitely…. entertaining.

October Music Series: Odroerir – Präludium

Posted on October 25, 2012 by necromoonyeti

I said I’d make it weird for the last week leading up to Halloween. Here’s some true kvlt kazoo metal to kick things off.

I have no idea if that’s actually what Odroerir are playing (I mean, Finntroll did it) or if it’s some medieval woodwind similar to what Stary Olsa use in the Drygula song I recently featured, but either way the “wtf” factor was probably not lost on them. Odroerir are a folk metal band with medieval tendencies hailing from the Thuringia region of Germany. They formed in 1998, and Präludium is the opener to their 2001 debut full-length Laßt Euch Sagen Aus Alten Tagen. The band’s name is a German variant of Icelandic Óðrerir, the name of the chalice of mead imbued with the knowledge of wisdom and poetry in Norse mythology. I don’t know that much wisdom went into crafting this song, but you can bet plenty of mead was involved.

October Music Series: Plethyn – Lawr y Lôn

Posted on October 24, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Plethyn are a Welsh band that formed some time back in the 1970s. Lawr y Lôn is the opening track from their 1995 release, Seidir Ddoe. They’re perhaps the only band I’ve stumbled upon that sing in Welsh, and it’s absolutely beautiful. As is the case for a lot of obscure older folk bands that pre-date popular interest in ethnic music, information on them is pretty slight. Here is a copy of an English translation of the lyrics that I found:

They do need men of fifteen stone, down the road, down the road
Of muscle flexed and good strong bone, down the road, down the road
If you’ve the guts and what it takes
They promise you, you’ll get your stakes
Gold is what the leprechaun makes, down the road

I’ve given all my life and worked, down the road, down the road
I’ve slaved long hours and never shirked, down the road, down the road
I’ve lived in dark and dreary huts
Collected scars like dustroad ruts
And suffered many jibes and butts, down the road

I must go now and give my all, down the road, down the road
There’s more to life than mere dole, down the road, down the road
I have no hope of a job nearby
So I’ll pack my bags and say goodbye
I need the brass, I’m not work-shy, down the road

I’ve always given all I had, down the road, down the road
But hardship tends to make one sad, down the road, down the road
Today the time has come, ’tis true
To think dark thoughts ’bout what to do
I’ve lived my life away from you, down the road

I must go back to my home and wife, up the road, up the road
I know full well there’s a better life, up the road, up the road
From oil-rig or from motorway
I’d give more than my double pay
To see that morning sun and stay, up the road

Alright. Today is the 24th, which means Halloween is a week away. I’m going to get a little more on focus from here on out. Plethyn serves as a pretty little conclusion to my general “if it’s folk it flies” approach. My next seven posts are going to hone in on the really bizarre, haunting, spooky stuff.

October Music Series: Metsatöll – Velekeseq Noorõkõsõq

Posted on October 23, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Metsatöll are a folk and heavy metal band out of Tallinn, Estonia. There probably aren’t too many bands you can say that about. The band first formed in 1999, and Velekeseq Noorõkõsõq appears on their 2004 debut full-length, Hiiekoda. You won’t hear any metal in this track though. What you get from the beginning just repeats on for three minutes. I chose this song because, however imaginative they may have been in creating it, it certainly feels like a completely authentic drinking song straight out of the Viking age. Metsatöll sing in ancient Estonian, or so I’m told. Their name is an ancient Estonian word for wolf.

It’s really amazing and quite relieving to me that Estonian tradition has sufficiently survived to make a song like this possible. Despite their absorption into the Soviet Union, the Baltic states seem to have clung to their traditions in what feels like impressively unadulterated form. I know the black/pagan metal band Skyforger have done a tremendous job of preserving quite authentic Latvian folk, and though I know significantly less about Metsatöll, songs like Velekeseq Noorõkõsõq lead me to believe they’re doing the same for Estonia.

To give you an idea of the possible antiquity of the song, or at least, the style that you are hearing, here is the intro to the Wikipedia entry on Estonian music: “The earliest mentioning of Estonian singing and dancing dates back to Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum (c. 1179). Saxo speaks of Estonian warriors who sang at night while waiting for an epic battle. The Estonian folk music tradition is broadly divided into 2 periods. The older folksongs are also referred to as runic songs, songs in the poetic metre regivärss the tradition shared by all Baltic-Finnic peoples.”

Did Saxo Grammaticus or his sources experience in the 12th century something quite similar to the 2004 recording you are hearing here? I think it’s a real possibility.

October Music Series: Смута – Ворон

Posted on October 22, 2012 by necromoonyeti

From the sweeping, epic introduction to the wild guitar solos falling somewhere between power metal and melodic death, Ворон (Voron) is one of those songs that struck me like a brick the very first time I heard it. Смута (Smuta) are yet another band out of Russia, hailing from Rybinsk in Yaroslavl Oblast. I don’t know much about the band, and I’ve been too hopelessly distanced from anything but my (relatively) mainstream folk metal connections to keep up with them lately, but their 2007 debut full-length, Смута Крови (Smuta Krovi), was a surprisingly well-informed album for a band that doesn’t appear to have any connections to the bigger names of the genre.

The death metal vocals are the only consistent factor throughout the album, with musical themes that incorporate Finntroll-esque folk metal, Pagan Reign/Твердь-styled Slavic pagan metal, some power metal and melodic death guitars, and a uniquely tame approach to black metal. It’s got nothing on Falconer’s Armod for perfecting a merger of the myriad metal subgenres, but it’s a worthy effort, and it grants them a unique sound which, with better production and a little more edge, could evolve into something really amazing. They’ve released two albums since Smuta Krovi that I’ve yet to hear, and revisiting the band here has certainly peaked my curiosity.

Voron is definitely the stand-out track of the album, and the intro says it all. It’s the one track in which their lack of an edge can definitely count as a good thing. The brief opening segment is enough to give a solid fantasy essence to a song that really doesn’t fit that bill beyond the thirty second mark, placing it in the odd context of bearing sort of formal, almost royal imagery that you can somehow pull off your best air guitar imitation to.

October Music Series: Alkonost – Sun Shine Our Land

Posted on October 21, 2012 by necromoonyeti

I first ran into Alkonost back in the days of Audiogalaxy, when I barely had a clue what metal beyond Metallica and Pantera consisted of. They are remarkably early for folk/pagan metal, forming in Naberezhnye Chelny, the second largest city of Tatarstan in Russia, in 1995. Their first demos were released in 1997, and “Sun Shine Our Land” appears on their 2000 debut full-length, Songs of the Eternal Oak.

I wasn’t really aware that anything describable as pagan or folk metal existed (and most of the standards by which the genres are judged had yet to be written), so for me it was something of an anomaly. I’d been listening to a lot of Nokturnal Mortum at the time, and I was beginning to develop this idea of “eastern” metal as something far more ah, I guess I’d say spiritual, than the western angst engines I’d been accustomed to. It stood apart, too, from the fantasy stuff I’d been getting into at the time. It was something quite different from Blind Guardian, Iced Earth, Rhapsody… it felt like fantasy (power) metal turned inside out, where the music wasn’t so much describing as becoming the myth. That’s a lot of what folk and pagan metal is, I suppose.

I find it a bit fascinating that, all inheritance from Bathory aside, the genre did emerge largely out of the former Soviet Union. It has a historical framework that goes beyond musical trends. These are bands that, in the new era of free speech that defined the 1990s, rejected the ideals of modernization and looked to idealize the past as a more authentic human experience than anything under pseudo-socialism. I don’t know how much Alkonost actually influenced the pagan and folk scenes that followed, but the fact that I’d heard of them as early as 2000 is a telling sign. “Sun Shine Our Land” was one of my favorite songs back then, and certainly still merits attention.

October Music Series: 下村陽子 – Beware the Forest’s Mushrooms

Posted on October 20, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Yoko Shimomura was a rising star when she composed the Super Mario RPG soundtrack in 1996, fresh out of Capcom and ready to embark on a higher profile career with Square. The whole soundtrack was exceptional, but one track in particular was so catchy that it’s been stuck in my head ever since, and it’s most certainly appropriate for a fall theme.

Within the game, the song plays to a forest maze–one of those looping maps that can have you wondering around forever if you don’t pay attention. ‘Forest music’ has always been among the best tracks in RPG scores, but I don’t know that anyone’s pulled one off as effectively as Yoko Shimomura. It’s not quite as dark and haunting as say, Koji Kondo’s “Forest” from A Link to the Past or Yasuaki ‘Bun Bun’ Fujita’s “Deep Forest” from Breath of Fire, nor as calm as Yasunori Mitsuda’s “Secret of the Forest” from Chrono Trigger, to name some contemporaries. It’s far more friendly and inviting, which really makes it all the more dangerous, because at the end of the day you’re still getting lost in a deep forest maze filled with monsters out to kill you. It draws you in, makes you want to keep on wandering, like a good proper evil enchanted forest ought to.

It’s also the theme song to Geno, a doll possessed by the spirit of one of the stars you’re out to rescue, who really creeped me out as a kid because I thought that orange thing on his hat was his nose for some reason.

October Music Series: Kukulcan – Tlamictilia Quixtiani

Posted on October 17, 2012 by necromoonyeti

There’s no good reason for pagan metal to be dormant in Central and South America. Hell, they have more to be pissed off about than anyone. As it stands though, Kukulcan is one of the only bands I have ever heard with a distinctly Aztec/Mayan theme. They come from Tlaxcala and Valle de Chalco, areas in the south of Mexico near the capital.

Apparently they have six demos and splits out now, but still no full-length cds. Tlamictilia Quixtiani is the opening track to Yaotlachinolli, their first demo, released in 2006. Here black metal serves as the backdrop for what sounds like a militant call to arms, amidst war horns, native drumming, and a woodwind that wavers between mourning and madness. That symbol in the four corners of the album cover is actually the Aztec swastika, which I couldn’t find much information on. But just in case such ambiguity fails to offend you, they made sure to plant a good old modern swastika in the middle of it. Ah, that must explain the Gothic font they used for their band logo. Such creative young lads…

But really, this demo is pretty great as pagan black metal goes. It’s an angry reassertion of pre-colonial heritage, noisily representing an indigenous American culture that gets largely ignored in the modern world.

October Music Series: Стары Ольса – Дрыгула

Posted on October 16, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Time has been getting the better of me so far this month, and I haven’t really been able to structure these posts in the order I’d initially intended. But while the songs I had in mind that require a bit more research go on hold, I offer you another taste of Belarusian folk/early music masterminds Stary Olsa.

I came across Дрыгула (Drygula) while I was posting up Dances, when I discovered that a number of their more recent songs were available for free download on their official website. Drygula is the title track to their 2009 release. To quote their website:

“This CD presents dance music from the late Middle Ages to early baroque, written in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Polacak Adversaria) and Western European countries. During these works’ performance, the instruments which correspond to their times are used.”

So according to the band, what you’re hearing here is uncompromised, authentic music of the Middle Ages. That is… pretty hard for me to believe, but who knows? Maybe 16th century Lithuania really was this awesome.

October Music Series: John Lee Hooker – Hobo Blues

Posted on October 14, 2012 by necromoonyeti

I’m going to turn west for my next few posts, and when we look at American folk we can’t ignore the blues. It’s an unfortunate fact that I know absolutely nothing about this genre. It’s a genre I’ve wanted to explore for a long, long time, but free time and interest simply haven’t yet coincided. I stumbled upon Hobo Blues entirely by accident about a year ago and have had a note glaring me in the face ever since: I had to work this song into a post one way or another.

You might ask how it legitimately fits into my theme. It’s certainly not about mythology or horror or anything that might immediately come to mind for the season. Quite the contrary, it calls to mind gritty dust and sweltering heat, tattered clothes and haggard spirits. But this is American folk and American tradition in a very real sense, and no old gods need be invoked to imbue it with otherwordly power. John Lee Hooker is in this video a man possessed, standing firm as steel while delivering an emotionally overwhelming performance. He taps into that same seemingly spiritual power that so many of the eastern bands I’ve featured aim to conjure, he just unabashedly draws it from within himself.