Tag Archives: pagan metal

October Music Series: Nokturnal Mortum – Lastivka

Posted on by necromoonyeti

And so my month of folk and folk/pagan/black metal indulgence comes to an end. Of course they’re the styles I listen to the most throughout the year, but October always holds a somewhat special status for the genres. It marks the height of fall and the coming of winter, the commencement of the six months of the year I enjoy most, and also the start of the holiday season. Halloween is something of the anti-holiday–an all-encompassing celebration of everything that is not modern Christian/Muslim/Jewish culture. It’s that one break in year-round social norms where people can dress and act in ways that, despite representing the human experience for the vast majority of our species’ existence, are strictly taboo in the today’s world. Sure, plenty of pagan practices may have lurked their way into Christmas and Easter. Sure Thanksgiving, despite its name, remains a fairly uncompromised belated harvest festival. But on Halloween we sugar-coat nothing but the candy, sending our children down the streets as ghouls and ghosts and all sorts of counter-cultural guises, embracing primal human nature with no need for repentance. It might be highly consumer-centric, but a little unrestrained gluttony seems thoroughly appropriate for the occasion. From death and the old gods to vampires and zombies, everything falling beyond the accepted sphere of modern religion has its day on October 31st.

Lastivka, alternatively titled Swallow, is a rather ridiculous rendition of what I gather is a traditional Ukrainian folk song. It first appears on Nokturnal Mortum’s Marble Moon ep, released in 1997. Enjoy.

Happy Halloween Shattered Lens.

October Music Series: Skyforger – Zviegtin’ Zviedza Kara Zirgi

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Latvia’s Skyforger have been around for ages. They first formed in 1991 as a folk-leaning death metal band called Grindmaster Dead, but by 1995 they changed their name to Skyforger and turned their attention to black metal. After leaving their mark on both the second generation of black metal and the formative years of pagan metal, they turned their attention to Latvian folk traditions unconditionally. Zobena Dziesma, translated as “Sword Song”, was released in 2003. It left metal at the door, and presented, in coordination with the Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, an outstanding compilation of songs in traditional Latvian style.

Here is the explanation on Skyforger’s official website for how Zobena Dziesma came to be:

“Skyforger is not a professional Folk group, and we are traditionally known for playing Folk/Pagan Metal. We started playing Folk music as amateur enthusiasts, only for ourselves. However, our friends and fans expressed a desire to hear more of these songs, and that led to the creation of this album. Most of the songs you can hear on this recording are taken from the repertoire of well known local Folk groups. Others are reworked versions of material from our previous albums. Our passion is to play olden songs of the war and mythology of our forefathers. In that respect, this album is no different from those we have recorded in the past. It is our tribute to ancient Latvian history, culture and folklore.”

Skyforger translate Zviegtin’ Zviedza Kara Zirgi as “Neighed the Battle Horses”. It’s the track that has always stood out to me most on the album. It is exceptionally visual. It’s one of those songs that transports you to another place and time, and allows you to engage an ancient world trapped somewhere between history and fantasy.

October Music Series: Твердь – Масленица Широкая

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUDu2Shtp6U

An unrelenting, wild ride through everything that makes Slavic pagan metal amazing, Масленица Широкая (Maslenitsa Shirokaya) is one of the finest songs in the entire genre. Anyone familiar with Russian pagan metal gods Pagan Reign should find the sound entirely familiar. When Pagan Reign broke up in 2006, Твердь (Tverd’) formed from the ashes. Guitarist Vetrodar and drummer Demosthen were the only returning members, but stylistically Tverd’s only album to date, Вслед за Солнцеворотом (Vsled Za Solntsevorotom), is such a direct continuation that it would be hard to understand Tverd’ as anything but a legitimate continuation of Pagan Reign. Even the band’s name is the title to Pagan Reign’s final album. It is also a reference, I would imagine, to their hometown Tver, just north of Moscow.

The quality of this song is just impeccable. It carries all of the epic glory of Pagan Reign’s Новгородские Пляски (Novgorodian Folk Dance), but with a more mature approach to the madness and the addition of a fantastic vocal performance by Svetlana Lebedeva. The song is structured, much like Novgorodian Folk Dance, to eschew standard composition and confront the listener with one bombastic movement after another, thriving in a state of constantly progressing triumphant climax. It lacks all of the frustration and anger that so many Slavic bands reflect in their recognition that the culture they’re preserving exists only in scattered embers. Maslenitsa Shirokaya is a pure celebration with no baggage. Cheers.

October Music Series: Odroerir – Präludium

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-aEi6Js6_o

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: Смута – Ворон

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWBbk5KVG5E

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 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: Kukulcan – Tlamictilia Quixtiani

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWVH2bsaQcs

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: Векша – На Пороге Ночи

Posted on by necromoonyeti

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM0EThFJM3Y

I’m not sure how На Пороге Ночи (Na Poroge Nochi) ever found its way to my collection. The 20 minute demo was released back in 1998, and it is to the best of my knowledge the only thing Векша (Veksha) ever released. Perhaps simply being Russian pagan metal in 1998 (they come from Yaroslavl) was enough to preserve them. The recording quality is clearly terrible, verging on the point of comical, but for me this is the selling point. What might have been a fairly average song in a top notch studio sounds here pretty bizarre. The first time you hear the vocals will be a definite “wtf” moment.

The song/album name appears to translate to “Midnight on the Threshold”, at least according to Google. When I first saw it I thought it was saying something about pierogies, but it was not. At least this is the only major disappointment. Good luck finding anything more than track titles out about this obscure band though.

October Music Series: Natural Spirit – Внукам Даждь-Бога

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Here’s a song I thought fit the season rather nicely. Natural Spirit is a folk/pagan metal band from Ukraine, and Внукам Даждь-Бога (To The Grandchildren of Dazhd-God, at least as Encyclopaedia Metallum translates it) appears on their original 1999 demo Star Throne. The band have released three albums since, most recently in 2011, but this is the only one I’ve heard, so I can’t speak for what they sound like these days.

I’m always a sucker for that cheap, almost SNES-sounding keyboard you find especially on Ukrainian pagan metal albums (Nokturnal Mortum’s cover of “Sorrow of the Moon” by Celtic Frost could be straight out of Secret of Mana or Soul Blazer at times). Of course there’s nothing authentic about it, but its primitive sound in comparison to other synth puts it in a unique position to sound both ancient and entirely unnatural. It’s both reverently pagan and haunting in a dark, fantasy-themed way, uniting visions of Tolkienic landscapes with conjurations of long forgotten gods.

The name in the title, Dazhd-God, refers to the Slavic sun god Dažbog, son of the fire god Svarog. The frequent references to Slavic mythology in Eastern European folk and folk metal are always revealing, if only for the lack of attention this pantheon receives. Translations of the Prose and Poetic Eddas are a dime a dozen, and most people who have the slightest passing interest in mythology have probably read at least some segments of them. History and Germanic Studies departments around the world specialize in them. As diligent as metal bands have been in preserving tales of the Norse gods, the historical texts are there to be had with or without them. With no Slavic Snorri Sturluson to fall back on, Eastern European bands interested in preserving and resurrecting the past share less company. They are far more uniquely responsible for my having ever even heard these names. It is perhaps a consequence of this that lends Slavic pagan metal a stronger affinity with mysticism, often coupled with an almost violent, desperate sense of pride. Внукам Даждь-Бога avoids the latter, but it definitely presents Dažbog in an otherwordly, supernatural light that you won’t find much of in Norse-centric metal beyond Burzum.

October Music Series: Nokturnal Mortum – Cheremosh

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Nokturnal Mortum is a name one should only ever drop with caution. They are unfortunately the flagship band of the Ukrainian white supremacist nsbm scene. One might expect idiotic ideas to lead to pretty dim-witted music, but Nokturnal Mortum broke the mold. In fact, they’re one of the most talented bands I have ever heard. Knjaz Varggoth has a seemingly unshakable knack for infusing his music with the all of the pride and hatred that his ideology implies. From 1996 up to the present they have remained on the cutting edge of the folk/pagan metal scene, like it or not.

Cheremosh is conveniently a track with no ideological strings attached. Appearing initially on the 1997 Marble Moon ep and then in slightly more refined form on To the Gates of Blasphemous Fire in 1998, Cheremosh is an instrumental song. The name refers to the Cheremosh river in western Ukraine. With a distinct build-up and climax characteristic of many of their finest songs, Cheremosh transitions from a secluded scene of the river rolling along to some convincing and bizarre pagan ritual. The folk is mostly keyboards–Nokturnal Mortum did not begin to employ traditional instrumentation extensively until the following year on NeChrist. (NeChrist, I recently discovered, is a pun. “Nechist” are evil spirits in Russian folklore.) Nokturnal Mortum did a pretty impressive job of inventing their own folk sound through synth though, and their first three albums gain a lot from it. If you can stomach their ideology, Nokturnal Mortum present some of the most compelling pagan metal on the market, and this isn’t the last time I’ll be featuring them this month.