Karelian Metal

I was searching Google for a suitable avatar image (which is a sorry tale unto itself). As always happens when I'm presented with a search engine, I started searching for odd things - in this case, images of underpants, cat vomit, Benjamin Disraeli, Ensign Pulver, uranium ("oh, so that's what lethal radiation looks like!")... Soon enough I got around to searching for images of Insomnium, which it turns out abound on the Internet, and one of them was from an apparently German publicity poster that showed the band in a suitable Dethklokian pose with the words (translated out of German) "Karelian Metal" hanging in mid-air over them like a bad omen.

So it's come to that, has it? Karelian metal. Soon we'll have "Western Karelian metal" and "South-Central Karelian metal" and "Occupied karelian metal" (the Russians still hold a goodly chunk of Karelia, but when asked about it, they shrug and say nothing). Or "Armpit of Karelia Karelian metal". To extend the idea a bit, we could have a "Central Arizona metal", and an "Unincorporated Maricopa County metal" and a "annexed by Surprise but not yet given city services metal " or a "fixing to be annexed in a bold end run from the south by Buckeye metal".

Mind you, there is already a precedent for gratuitous invention of labels in metal music. I remember the first time I heard of "Blackened Death Metal" I thought it was something that people pan-fried in New Orleans. Or "Symphonic Black Metal", which sounds like an oxymoron at first and later, when you actually hear the music, still sounds like an oxymoron. So "Karelian metal" isn't the cutting edge of some new fad; it merely represents the latest manifestation of metal's tendency to compartmentalize itself with neat Teutonic labels.

And why Karelia? Are the lads from Insomnium Karelian? Or do the Finns still harbor a deep longing for Karelia? I suspect that, much like the Old West, the lure of Karelia is more symbolic than practical. But a symbolic longing can be even more potent than an actual practical desire - you can buy off someone with merely practical interests, but once you get that hazy emotional heimat-longing stuff going on, things get more complicated and before you know it, you're making albums of highly evolved, most excellent atmospheric metal and calling it Karelian metal. And I wish them good health in so doing.