Pagan Knights at the Highline Ballroom

In college, I had some ambitions of pursuing a career in ethnomusicology - roughly the point where music and anthropology meet - and I have a bit of soft spot for anyone who can drag ethnomusicology into interesting situations. Like, say, a heavy metal concert.

See, I went into last night's show believing that Tyr wrote all of their music. Shaken by frontman Heri Joensen's intro to "Sinklars Vísa," which he described as being about "a group of Scots getting their asses kicked in Norway in a war around 1610 or so," this belief was shattered by the number of non-English lyriced songs that Joensen introduced as Faroese traditional music. Clearly Joensen, who does most of the band's arranging, enjoys his research; Tyr does as much recasting of the music of the past into modern idioms as they do writing new material, and - in tribute to the intellectualism of their art - is equally effective at both efforts. Seriously: folk songs you can mosh to? It doesn't get much better.

Really, though I shouldn't be surprised: using traditional music as a basis for pagan metal seems like a pretty logical extension for a genre that already pulls pretty much of all of its subject matter from the past, right?

Getting Psyched for Tyr

The Pagan Knights show - Tyr, Suidakra, and Alestorm - is this Sunday night. I was enthused about the idea of seeing Tyr again when I bought the ticket, but since then I've discovered a few things:

• I like Suidakra's most recent album enough that I'd probably go see them on their own anyway.
  
  
• Tyr is the pagan metal version of Soundgarden: every time I hear something new, it takes me a few listens to get it...and then I slowly grow to love it. It took me 30 minutes into their set last year to grasp where they were going, Eric the Red was a closed book that I only kept trying to reopen because I wanted to translate the magic of the live performance to the recordings, and Land seemed a difficult disappointment until once again something clicked. Now I wake up with "Eric the Red" stuck in my head.
  
  
• Now that I've heard Alestorm, I see how Pagan Knights is trying to be a better, more efficient Paganfest II. Alestorm and their pirate metal takes the place of Swashbuckle and Blackguard, Suidakra has the kind of pop energy to fill the Eluveitie/Korpiklaani portion of the bill, and Tyr's more intellectual focus is a stand in for Moonsorrow and Primordial.

Three more reasons to get psyched for Sunday. I can't wait!