Folk Metal

The village band, armed

The loudest village band on earth, folk metal, straps a fiddle, flute, hurdy-gurdy, lute, kantele or set of bagpipes onto a metal band and lets the old melody lead the charge, so that a tune which once kept a barn dancing now rides on distorted guitars like a wooden plough fitted with an iron share and torn through frozen ground. Keyboards stand in when the real instrument is missing. The vocals run from clean singing and choirs to death growls and shrieks, and a few Finnish bands bring in the Sámi joik.

What separates the genre from its neighbours is where the music comes from. Viking metal and pagan metal borrow gods, sagas and old religion, while folk metal digs up the tunes themselves and very often the instruments that played them. The subject can be myth, nature, history or the tavern. The melody has to be old.

Folk metal bands load language into the arsenal too. Finntroll sing in Swedish, Skálmöld in Icelandic, Korpiklaani in Finnish and English, and Skyforger recorded songs in Old Prussian, a tongue with no native speakers left, dragging it out of the grave and handing it a riff. Nature fills the lyrics of the Finnish woodsmen. Celtic myth fills the Irish records.

Folk metal from every soil

Planted by a handful of bands in England, Ireland and Germany in the first half of the nineties and harvested at industrial scale in Finland after 2000, the map follows national tradition, each scene digging its own instruments out of the ground like swords from a burial mound and sharpening them on the local tune. Ireland built Celtic metal around Cruachan. Germany built medieval metal on the bagpipes, lutes and hurdy-gurdies of Subway to Sally and In Extremo, and Finland sent out Finntroll, Korpiklaani, Ensiferum and Moonsorrow within a few years of each other.

The folk metal map kept widening. Switzerland sent Eluveitie, the Baltic states sent Skyforger and Metsatöll, the Russian band Arkona carried Slavic tradition east, and oriental metal grew up in the Middle East, where Orphaned Land in Israel and Melechesh built their riffs around the oud and the saz. No two scenes tune alike.

The borders run in three directions. Pirate metal is the costume branch, where Alestorm swapped the village square for the quarterdeck, and the border with power metal runs through Wind Rose and through Ensiferum, whose second record mixed folk with melodic death and power metal. On the black metal side, Agalloch, Panopticon and Saor use folk for atmosphere rather than for the dance. Their fires burn colder.

Records for the long table

Six folk metal albums, from a Dublin debut to a pirate ship off the Scottish coast. Pour accordingly.

• Cruachan Tuatha na Gael Nazgul's Eyrie, 1995

  Keith Fay's debut: Irish myth and Celtic history laid over black metal, the production thin and the tunes stubborn enough to outlive it.

• Finntroll Jaktens tid Spinefarm, 2001

  Black metal and Nordic folk dancing to the accordion, Katla singing entirely in Swedish, and Jonne Järvelä adding joik as a guest.

• Korpiklaani Spirit of the Forest Napalm, 2003

  Accordion, violin, jouhikko and flute on the debut, with "Wooden Pints" among fourteen songs sung in English and Finnish.

• Ensiferum Iron Spinefarm, 2004

  Kantele and wind instruments over melodic death and power metal, "Lai Lai Hei" past seven minutes, and Jari Mäenpää's last album before Wintersun.

• Eluveitie Slania Nuclear Blast, 2008

  Anna Murphy's hurdy-gurdy joined full time, Jens Bogren produced, and "Inis Mona" borrowed the Breton tune "Tri Martolod" and became a concert staple.

• Alestorm Black Sails at Midnight Napalm, 2009

  Strings, brass and folk instruments on the pirate record, with "Keelhauled" as the single and a Wacken 2008 show on the special edition DVD.