Hurra! It's Viking Metal Week!
 

Yup, it's viking metal week. Viking metal is "a subgenre of heavy metal music characterised by its galloping pace, keyboard-rich anthemic sound, bleakness and dramatic emphasis on Norse mythology, Norse paganism, and the Viking Age."

Thank you Wikipedia.

Now, let's see some Viking METAL!!

This is for Yngve (whose connection with this particular song is quite intimate in this case) - Enslaved's "Større Enn Tid, Tyngre Enn Natt".

Yes! I love Viking metal. Check these out:



Good shit.

Enslaved and Bathory are cool. I used to listen to a bit of Kampfar, Tyr, Mithotyn, Moonsorrow, Falkenbach, Ensiferum and Amon Amarth too. But none are as good as Windir so I'll post about a few of their songs in Yngve's absence, and because they're not getting enough attention in their thread :D Btw it was he who pointed out that they have an extremely high number of plays per listener on last.fm considering their popularity... 71 plays per listener equates to each one listening to their whole discography twice.

Windir is automatically cool in my book simply because Valfar used Fasttracker 2 to create his music :D He died like a tourist, though, freezing to death in the mountains.

Have some Ensiferum!

Tore you need to show you respect for your heritage and dress up in full viking garb and take a picture.

Moon_Effin_Sorrow! Their latter stuff in a little more focused on the black metal end of the spectrum, but I love it. Just to jest, I've got to mention Manowar, because they did influence Bathory's first viking record, Blood on Ice, eventhough it didn't see the light of day until the mid 90's. The throne, however, belongs to Enslaved.

Haha I noticed that program when I was watching some of their backstage material. How common is death by hypothermia in Norway? I'm guessing it's mainly confined to tourists who trek through the mountains without being properly prepared for rapid changes in weather?

my fave ensiferum track

Interesting genre of the week. I had some Ensiferum songs on my computer a long time ago. Dunno if Absu falls under this category, but I liked their album from last year. Have to check out Windir.

Absu is absolutely incrediable, but their from Texas and do the "occult" shtick. Blindingly fast blackened thrash/death, the drummer is not of this world.

My favorite viking metal band is Destroy Destroy Destroy, I think that's because I'm partial to American metal.

This is something to be happy about?

Amon Amarth are quite awesome.

Being pedantic, they are more like melodic death metal, but their lyrics all follow the viking theme! :D

You definitely should give Windir a shot. Arntor is their masterpiece but the more modern sounding 1184 and Likferd albums which come afterwards are also good.

Definitely the best battle song ever.

Well, I think the most common way to die of hypothermia is drunk people falling asleep in the snow. Then you have stuff like scooter accidents where they fall through sea ice or perhaps avalanches etc. To die in the mountain on the way to his cabin basically because he hadn't put on enough clothes is a little tourist-y :D

A lot of people get helped down from the mountains, often because they are not prepared well which is often because they exaggerate their ability to stay warm or resist fatigue. Among other things, I think people underestimate the cold and and the fatigue and so on when they haven't really experienced it, so .. those situations often have a newbie-ish flavour!