Celtic Metal idea...

Poststructural Pub
1

I know that most of the metal that people here are aquianted with is the brass and nickel of their whistles. I like nickel plated whistles a lot.

Enough about that.

Anyway, I am a metal head through and through. I play Jazz, blues, pop, a little classical, experimental music, and various folk styles (including irish, though I suppose not with any degree of authenticity. I’m more of a sampler platter that a pro at anything. To be honest, I like it that way). But my favorite styles of music to play are undoubtably the melodic forms of heavy metal.

The problem seems to be that I became bored with the genre at large, swimming in a sea of stunted adolecent agression and lacking any sort of musical sophistication (bar a few shining examples). My solution so far is to try and make it a little more refined while still keeping that dark quality that drew me to it in the first place. I’ve made a lot of basterdized tunes, drawing inspiration from other forms of music and “metalizing” them. Probably the best example of this is a Jazz Metal Waltz I wrote a couple of years ago. Metal Instrumentation, but with more interesting harmonies and more thought out use of chromatics. It’s quite short. Due to life and circumstances it never fleshed out the way I intended, but I did produce a main theme that I am very happy with.

I uploaded it here:
Monday, The Metal Waltz.

The last note is cut off of this particular upload, but I don’t want to upload it again (dial up). It’s the tonic, ‘E’. Just hum an E or play it on the whistle right as the song cuts off, and you will get the picture :smiley:.

Anyway, I’m quite interested in trying a similar type of project with some celtic tunes that I think might work well (the Star of the County Down, and Raggle Taggle Gypsy are two that come to mind right away). I’ll probably do this as soon as I get some place were I can record guitars and whistles

I realize this is probably not a heavy metal crowd, and that such an idea may even offend a few here. I just wanted some feedback, and some possible suggestions for tunes that might work particularly well.

2

Have you ever heard of the group Tempest?
(there is one that’s straight rock, I think. I’m referring to a band by that name which does celtic/metal fusion.)
In all likelihood, this would be a sound reviled by many serious-heads on this board. I find some of their stuff quite interesting. Lief Sorbye’s Norwegian-accented singing voice is a little funky to listen to sometimes.

3

I’ve heard of tempest, but I’ve not actually heard them. I will look around and see what I can find of them.

4

Check out Enter The Haggis: http://www.enterthehaggis.com/index.php

I’ve seen them two times and they ROCK! Not really quite as metallic as your clip (very cool, btw) but pretty intense. As a matter of fact, they do Star Of The County Down. Beneath the Rock trappings, they seem to have a genuine feel and love for the trad music.

5

Celtic metal.

6

Well, I don’t know much about Celtic Metal/Metal Fusion, but I heartily enjoy bands like Dropkick Murphy’s and Flogging Molly that have an Irish/celtic theme to them.
There have even been other bands that have done classic Irish songs in simple one-off rock n’ roll style, A Simple Plan i think did one…
I think one either likes or hates these kind of things though…like Metallica’s rendition of Whisky in the Jar.

7

Check out these guys.

http://www.horslipsrecords.com/

Slan,
D.

8

Tempest are a local group around here. If you want to lower your IQ and hurt your ears, they are the ticket. They even have a guy in tights, a la Jim Dandy. Interestingly, they possess individual greater talent than the sum total when they are together. Several of the members do folk gigs, including at the retirement community where I work(!), doing Scandinavian and Celtic-y folk. My younger boy likes em, while the rest of us wait for the more trad groups at the various fairs and festivals where I have seen them.

I know I am an old fogey, but I don’t need a metal redux of Irish music…just play rock music or somethin’. Floggin’ Mollie or Pogues is as rock-y as I need it…

But I have noticed a pattern, not just of Tempest, where people who are fairly accomplished have several incarnations, playing straight trad, medieval-renaissancy kinda trad, and rock-New Agey stuff. They just want to work and I appreciate that.

9

Based on the one cd of theirs my oldest son gave me some years ago, I’d give Tempest higher marks than that. Especially because his younger brother really got into it–we listened to it steadily in the car on the way to his school for quite a while. And then it gave way to Old Blind Dogs and then to Altan and Dervish (with side trips to Flook). Now he’s trying to teach himself to play one of Aaron’s PVC flutes. So, like Bob Dylan says, “I started out on burgundy…”

The Prodigals first cd is a good Irish-influenced rocker. Not quite as punk as the Dropkicks.

Jordan

10

There’s a group I haven’t heard in a long time!

11

There was an excellent programme running weekly on rte television at the moment"reeling in the years" ad they showed an old 70’s clip of an ad that Horslips done for some orange juice in ireland. it was pretty cool.

Incidentally ever heard of “skyclad”?
Interesting use of fiddles especially on “widdershin jig”.

12

Maybe they recorded better stuff than I heard on the three occassions I heard em. You never know, personnel changes, whatever…
With me, when I hear a metalized version of a trad tune, it has to show me something new or different about it to make it worth listening to, not just played on the eeelectric mando just to be doing it… that was my beef. Not big on traps either.

13

I used to be really into Punk so I listened to a lot of Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly you might or might not like them but I can reccomend two albums frome different bands first try “Ooot and Aboot” by the Real McKenzies they are more of a Punk band but this album has a sort of metal feel to it and also this one you will like a lot probably is “Album 1994” by Subway to Sally that might be kind of hard to find but amazon will have them both.

14

I should mention that there’s a really great Irish punk band called The Tossers, who used to play in bars around my home town of DeKalb, IL.

There better stuff is their older stuff; they had a self-produced album called “We’ll never be sober again,” which was really good. Another self-produced album called “The Pint of No Return” was also nice.

Recent offerings through Thick Records and available on Amazon are a bit too political, a bit too rambling and free-form, a bit lacking in energy. There was a lot of energy on “The Long Dim Road,” tho. Stilll, their earlier stuff was better in my opinion.

But they’re a great band. I know a lot of people claim this-or-that band is the next Pogues, but the Tossers really were close, closest I ever heard, to picking up where the Pogues left off.

Caj

15

Thanks for all the recomended listening. I’m enjoing it very much, particularly Enter the Haggis (though I haven’t got to hear much from any of them yet).

Seems like most of these guys come from a trad background and are putting it to work in a Rock setting, as where I have a metal background and am more drawing inspiration from trad. Another key diffrence seems to be goals. They seem to be working more on the enrichment of the folk tration, and I’m thinking more in terms of the enrichment of the uh… “metal tradition”:stuck_out_tongue:

None of them are quite the amount of metal I’m envisioning, but It’s kinda a strange mix, and I suppose it would be difficult to pull off with taste. I guess I have my work cut out for me. :sunglasses:

16

What kind of a combo did you have in mind?

17

I’m not sure what you mean by “combo”.

If you mean it in the jazz sense of like… instruments… probably two Electric guitars, bass, vox, Keyboard; and Whistles, flutes, pipes and fiddles where approprate. Though, I don’t know where I’ll find a good piper or fiddler that are into black metal. Not that there aren’t, it’s just a matter of one being at a location near me. I can do the whistels and flutes, at least for recordings (Possibly live, though I’m much more useful on a guitar than a whistle… then again, good guitar players are a dime a dozen).

Oh yeah, and a drum set. I guess that’s kinda important in rock.

If you mean what I am envisioning musically, I’m thinking of covering Irish trad tunes in a black metal style. That, to me at least, means a more melodic form of death metal, usually with some strong influences from classical music. The clip I posted in the beginning of this thread might be considered black metal by some, though it is not as aggresive as black metal generally is, and a bit more harmonically sophisticated, but that is my style anyway.

The main thing I’m thinking is totally gained-out sounding guitars, drums with double kick, fairly agressive vocals (though not screaming) you know, basic metal staples. In terms of construction: Trad tunes; mostly those in minor and dorian keys; with trad style ornamentation for melodies (more chromatic grace notes. Augmented fourths and sevenths, as prime candidates, closely followed by diminished seconds and fourths), reharmonizations to give it a metal feeling. I’m thinking music that is unquesitonably metal with primarlily metal instrumentation (though not exclusivly), but are recongizably trad melodies. But it would definately be placed in the metal section at the store, and more metal heads would probably be into it than ‘trad heads’.

It’s kinda an ITM gateway drug for the metal crowd. Most people into hardcore would find almost all of the stuff mentioned in this thread very tame. What I’m thinking would probably still be slightly tame, but still on familiar ground.

So, I hope somewhere in there I answered whatever question you were asking.

18

I meant how much metal and how much trad that is what I meant. I see where you are trying to go with this some of my friends and I have been trying to put a similar band together except with Jazz not metal.

19

Yikes! Celtic Jazz sounds scary! or awesome… You mean… like reharmonized trad tunes as the head, and then the solos, probably with a lot of trad instruments, possibly an improvised cadenza to open the peice and so on, following the ‘regular’ jazz format (if there is such a thing). Sounds like fun, although, chromatic piping might be terrifying, I don’t really know how piping works, so everything about it freaks me.

I’ve done some tinkinering of this sort with Jazz and Metal in the past… but never Jazz, Celtic and Metal.

20

Well the plan was to have Flute/Whistle/Mandolin played by myself and Trumpet by one of my friends then have the usual Bass, Drums, Guitar, Keys as rhythm the thought was to have some trad tunes with jazz backing plus some original some standards and some improve. We still need a Bass and Keys player then to actually devote time to it.