REKINDLING THE VARANGIAN FLAME: PART 1
by Rowdy Geirsson
“Never have I seen a more complete denouncement of the meaning of human life than that murky, yellow obscenity that hovers above the rooftops of Miklagård like a celestial plague raining its poison down upon the feeble souls below during the darkest depths of the eternal night,” Alexi
Laihiala sighed heavily, his face serene despite the grimness of his statement. “It made me want to kill myself.”
Sitting beside him with an appropriately dangerous-looking acoustic axe resting on his lap was Ville Mäenpää who played a few strings and quietly hissed,
“Kiss of the death-cloud! Burning in your lungs. Kiss of the death-cloud! Now your life is done.”
Alexi twisted his neck to avoid the strands of long, dyed-black hair that the wind insisted on blowing in his face as though he were currently filming a melancholic music video and continued speaking once the short musical interlude had ended. “The infinite pointlessness of the travesty known as human life overwhelmed me, as did the vastness of all the blasphemous airborne particulate matter. I could barely breathe and thought only of slipping away into the quiet embrace of the final, black void.”
And thus began my formal introduction to Varjagikaarti, the most influential and innovative band to emerge from the underground extreme metal scene that has since come to be known as the
New Wave of Finnish Varangian Metal (NWFVM). Essentially, a spin-off of its Viking and folk metal brethren, NWFVM altered the course of metal history forever when its adherents abandoned