Folkfest of the North, Boston: The Happiest Place on Earth

It’s all fun and games in the mosh pit until someone loses an eye, excepting the kick off show for the Folkfest of the North tour last Thursday; there in the Brighton Music Hall’s snug brick embrace, they lost their lunch instead. The pit is indisputably the worst place for a metalhead to blow chunks. Imagine a child enthusiastically jumping in a puddle of fresh mud without their Wellies to safeguard them in the splash zone. Now swap “mud” with “vomit,” and “child” with “adults in sleeveless jean jackets, decorated with spikes.” The likeliest outcome is grim and gross in equal measure.

But instead of making mayhem out of a mess, the attendees formerly bullrushing each other for sport pivoted: They draped arms over shoulders, formed a circle and danced a metal show equivalent of Ring Around the Rosie, gyring with the same joyful abandon as a silt-slicked tyke. The bad news is, anybody within nasal range risked catching the wafting telltale stench of disgorged gastric acid. The good news is, they had a good time regardless, synched with the sylvan melodies and galvanic virtuosity that wed folk metal to, as well as distinguish it from, cousin sub-niches in the most brutal musical genre.

The Folkfest of the North tour comprises a 28-city sojourn and a lineup of four acts, each as different from the rest in influences as sensibility: Taiwanese wonder Nini, fashioning traditional Chinese instruments—a’la the liuqin, the zhongruan and the sanxian—into implements of clarion aggression; Trollfest, the free and easy Oslo eight-piece presently reimagining flamingos as agents of vibrant world domination; Ensiferum, bringing tales of Finnish mythology stateside with a lightning strike’s intensity; and Korpiklaani, one of folk metal’s biggest driving forces for the last 20 years. In this niche, they’re superstars, though they seem not to have gotten the memo. Anyone loitering in the venue’s entrance might’ve noticed Jonne Järvelä, Korpiklaani’s frontman, cutting his unmistakable figure as he sauntered in from the biting cold like a concertgoer ready for a night of Norse and Eastern roistering, and not like the headlining band’s singer.

Maybe it’s a matter of scale. The Brighton Music Hall holds up to about 500 people, give or take, plus two bars in the stage area, and a third behind it, near the bathrooms. There might not be a better way for the talent to get in than the front door. But Jonne’s casual stroll through the crowd, and the lack of frenzied uproar his presence caused within the gathering, represent two proofs of many about what defines the folk metal niche: that it is a broadly laid back, genial subculture within an ecosystem likewise broadly associated with misanthropy, and most of all that its fans are the happiest metal fans on the whole goddamn planet.

The mosh puke is a terrific object lesson in folk metal’s jubilation. Life gave them a pool of someone’s regurgitated dinner; they made lemonade. It’s not that metal fans of other stripes—death, black, stoner, doom—would blanche at the sight of upchuck. Rather, they might just as soon stomp about the stage floor, like rowdy kids on a disgusting slip and slide. The difference is in perspective. Someone spewed on the ground. You can either be mad, and dance atop it, or you can be giddy, and dance around it. In both cases, the ground is a spill zone; you might as well choose giddiness. But it’s easier to make that choice when you’re innately inclined toward exuberance to start with, and folk metal fans are primed for that kind of upbeat engagement with the music and with each other.

None of the Folkfest patrons I chatted with at the show consented to go on the record. (They’re a happy lot, but they appreciate their privacy. I can’t hold that against them.) What commonly came up in each of these conversations were testimonies to the music’s cornerstone role in their lives; their relationship to folk metal is longstanding, which is true for many metal subgenres, except that the communities in those subgenres aren’t built on the same constitutional warmth as folk metal. It’s said that heavy metal is a welcoming, inclusive space, and as a general sentiment, this holds. But individual metal fanbases present varying sets of hang ups and insularities, from snooty, uptight elitism or, specific to National Socialist black metal (NSBM), braying supremacist ideologies.

It should go without saying that folk metal is a world away from NSBM’s virulent hatred (but let’s say it anyway). The absence of pretense, though, is a refreshing tonic. Thursday night, a person without a shred of exposure to the style could have gone to the Brighton Music Hall and not only had a good time, but be accepted by veterans who’ve listened to bands like Korpiklaani and Ensiferum for almost as long as they’ve been active.

Other metal demographics have their own cohort of longtime participants, of course. That’s not unusual. But the key difference between those scenes and folk metal is the “folk” itself. “Folk,” as a hallmark of cultural traditions and aesthetics, is passed down from one generation to the next, a gift of memories and stories that have shaped their people for years and then some. To turn away a newcomer to folk metal would be a betrayal of terms; for some, it is incumbent on them to bring uninitiated listeners into the fold, so they too can celebrate the vast heritages represented by the subgenre. After all, once upon a time the diehard folk metal fans were unfamiliar with the style; several decades later, they’re practically elder statesmen.

If this sounds like its own form of pretense, “heritage” at Folkfest of the North meant, among other things, Nini and her band playing a cover of Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time”; it meant watching a gaggle of Norwegian men dressed in violent pink flamingo costumes, their faces decorated in glow paint, exhorting the audience to dance like the inspiration of their outfits; it meant joining a conga line led by those same men, wending their way through the venue and joined by members of other acts. (Despite just having finished her set, Nini showed no sign of post-performance wear as she joined the revelry.) It meant thrashing along to Ensiferum’s mixture of buzzsaw musicianship with Finnish mythmaking, folkloric sagas and shanties, and standing in Korpiklaani’s thrall as Jonne, one of music’s most compelling frontmen in any genre, lead the crowd in beer hall songs, Sámi drum in hand.

Folk metal is serious. Its performers hold sincere reverence for their cultures and their influences; they are not charming curios, but meaningful signifiers of their homelands. But folk metal bands, at the same time, don’t take themselves seriously. Again, Trollfest is the exemplar in this instance; if Weird Al ever adopted metal as his new mien for the rest of his life, he’d probably look and sound an awful lot like them. Even Ensiferum, who hew closest to the stereotyped metal band “image,” approached their set with a lightheartedness baked into lead singer Petri Lindroos’ interactions with the audience between each song, as if addressing old friends upon reuniting with them for the first time in ages. Whoever you were, whatever your connection to the music, in those moments of address, you belonged.

One day, the successors to Korpiklaani, Ensiferum and Trollfest—among whose number we can count Nini—might make the trip to Boston and play the Brighton Music Hall, too. On that day, their audience might include the grown children of fans who made it to the Folkfest of the North. If so, they’ll be just as gracious and gregarious, keeping alive the traditions of the niche for the next generation to come. That’s the character embodied by folk metal’s devotees: even the people you don’t know in the scene feel like kin; and if you don’t know anyone, that means you’re a long-lost cousin who’s finally meeting the rest of the family.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.