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.