Defining Folk Metal

Is it strange to love two completely different genres of music? Personally I do not think so. While I grew up I was a metal loving teenager that discovered traditional folk music and started loving it too.

But fusions are possible in music and the odds might be so that there is a subgenre called folk metal.

What can you expect? Well, it is metal and mainly sang in a death metal grunt voice, but combined with traditional melodies and instruments.

So far I can tell most folk metal band do have at least a violin player and pipes and whistles are commonly used as well.

The themes are mainly those you find in traditional folk music and sometimes even traditional tunes get “metalized”. Think for example of Metallica covering Whiskey in the Jar.

Folk metal is not always that Celtic. There are also Scandinavian and Russian folk metal band.

Most known Celtic folk bands are Crauchan from Ireland or the Swiss band Eluveitie.

From Scandinavia we have bands like the Finnish Korpiklaani.

They might sound different from each other, but still they are all unique in their own way, also in the traditional instruments used. But there are always traditional instruments used with modern ones.

Also can some of the music they play be traditional as well. But the main difference between Metallica covering “Whiskey in the Jar” and Cruachan playing “The Very Wild Rover”, for example, is that Metallica remains a trash or speed metal band and plays the song in that way, while Cruachan is a folk metal band and will use some more traditional instruments in it.

You may call it a fusion between tradition and metal.