"Metal all the time, in every bar"

           Finland is known as being a sort of Mecca for metalheads. Sure, Germany has Wacken, the UK has the ones that started it all, and Norway is kvlt, where else can you go and easily find a bar that plays exclusively rock and metal music? And I don't mean just once a week or the possibility of one song a night. Or, where else can you find a country where most of the population can play at least one musical instrument and and a good few of them have been in a band at some point in their life? Where can you go and hear Nightwish or Sonata Arctica coming from the speakers in the lingerie department of a major department store (a Finnish version of The Bay or Macy's)? While I am not the most traveled person, hailing from Toronto, Canada, having only traveled to a handful of European countries in my short years, I think I'm pretty safe to say that Finland really is a haven for metalheads. That gif of Vreth (Finntroll) saying “in Finland its metal all the time, in every bar” is pretty damn close to the truth.

            I first found out about/fell in love with Finland through listening to music. Yes, I was one of those14 year olds who wanted to marry Ville Valo of HIM; probably one of Finland's best known musical artists. But before you close your browser window in a fit of “she's not metal” rage, let me finish. I was a diehard HIM fan, and still really appreciate their music even though I've stopped listening to only them, and through that band I was able to discover popular Finnish rock bands, some that have reach international fame and some that have only really been popular within Finland. The rock bands here have got a pretty strong fan-base around the world regardless of how small that fan-base is. But because I listened to so much music from Finland, it spurred me on to find out more about this little-known country which seemed similar to my own snowy homeland. As for metal, well I wasn't quite the metalhead back then as I am now; I only listened to a sprinkling of metal amongst my hardcore HIM listening. To be frank, half the vocals drove me nuts because they weren't Valo's baritone; ah, to be a pigheaded teenager. I was determined to go to Finland and I got the chance through my university as an exchange student at the University of Helsinki. In late August of 2011, I became a resident of Helsinki and the real fun began.

            Remember how I said I wasn't that into metal when I was younger compared to now? Well, since I was in Helsinki, basically the centre of the Finnish universe, there was usually at least one concert happening every week somewhere in Helsinki. To put it into perspective, between late 2004 and August 2011, I had been to eight concerts. Between September 2011 and May 2012, the time I lived in Helsinki, minus almost a month that I was back in Canada for Christmas, I went to 38 concerts. Some of these bands weren't metal bands, but, I did grow to love metal so much more because of concerts I went to just for shits and giggles because it was so cheap to see these bands compared to going to shows in Toronto. I was seeing bands I wouldn't normally see in Canada because it would just be too expensive for me; I live 2 hours from Toronto/a decent venue and normal concert prices for these bands would be around 35 Canadian dollars. I really was able to expand my listening repertoire while living in Helsinki. My friend would want to see a band that I had heard of but never listened to before and I’d agree to go, then I would come out with a new band that I was into. This is when my love of Folk/Viking/Pagan metal really ignited; I had always liked the idea of it but had only ever really listened to less than a handful of decent bands from those subgenres. It was from seeing these bands live that I was able to fully appreciate their music - for example Lauri “Varulven” Õunapuu of Metsatöll who made me dizzy from the amount of times he switched from guitar to a traditional instrument that I’ve never even seen before. If you can play bagpipes and make them sound badass, I’m pretty sold on your music.

           

I think that could be where Finland has such a strong connection to music. You may or may not know, Finns are NOT Vikings (Finland is a Nordic country not a Scandinavian one. Educate yourselves) so that means they don’t have the same Viking lore as the Scandinavian countries. Which means their mythology is not centered on warriors. Without going into it too much, Finnish Paganism has lots of nature (birds, lots of birds) and lots of music; the stories were passed down orally through runo songs for centuries before Elias Lönnröt wrote them down in The Kalevala. The main character in The Kalevala, the shaman Väinämöinen, who has been identified as one of Tolkien's sources for the character of Gandalf, is portrayed as having an amazing voice and carrying a kantle made of a pike's jawbone with him everywhere he goes. A kantele made of a pike’s jawbone? Sounds pretty metal to me. I took a class at the University of Helsinki that was called The Kalevala in Music. In that class we focused a lot on the classical composers that wrote music based around the Kalevala, but we also talked a lot about modern day Finnish musicians that use the Kalevala for inspiration, like Amorphis and Korpiklaani. How cool is the idea that Amorphis can play the main stage at Tuska Open Air Metal Festival, the biggest Metal music festival in the Nordic countries, and all they do is sing about centuries-old myths of their home country and a large number of people in attendance won’t have any idea that Mermaid is actually about Väinämöinen being a creep about marrying Joukahainen’s beautiful sister, Aino, who had been promised to him if he saved her brother, so she turns herself into a salmon. The mythological Finns fought with songs and spells rather than relying on swords and other weapons all the time. It’s not surprising that music is such a part of Finnish life that it’s basically second nature to Finns.

I haven't yet been fortunate enough to stay in Finland past May, so I've missed the Finnish summers which means I haven't had the chance to attend the copious amounts of festivals that happen here in the summertime. But if Wacken, in Germany, is the biggest metal music festival, Finland has to take the cake for the most metal music festivals. Tuska Open Air, Sauna Open Air, Provinssirock and Nummirock being some of the big names, along with a host of smaller festivals; you could probably do a festival a weekend if you had the time and funds. I’ve only ever been to one metal festival, and I guess only one summer music festival, and it was this past summer when I went to Mayhemfest at Ontario Place. If you want to know how tiny the metal scene is in Toronto, the bands at Mayhemfest were complaining that it wasn’t worth it to do a Toronto date because it was the smallest turnout on that tour, a measly 7000 people. A band like Children of Bodom can easily sell out, or at least pack a house, in Finland, and probably most other places, like Germany, but as one of the bands at Mayhem, they were on a side stage. I went to see Finntroll in Toronto before I moved back to Finland this summer and there were probably just over 100 people there. It was lovely because it was an awesome small show but that would never happen in Finland. I think it’s threat to future decent metal shows in Canada because the bands and their management and whatever other powers that be don’t see the point if no one is going to show up if they can just focus on places where they are assured a big turnout.

            Let's get back to the metal culture that thrives in Finland. Remember how I mentioned Vreth saying that it was metal all the time in every bar? That's because there is a scene for it, meaning that more than one bar can survive on catering exclusively to a specific subculture, even though people outside the subculture go to these places as well. You don't get that in Canada, or at least I haven't found it. We might have Hot Topic (cue mass eye-roll) and the odd struggling shop that sells band merch and albums, poor HMV, but in Finland, at least in the bigger cities, you can easily find a record store that is stuffed full of the albums you are looking for; Music Hunter in Helsinki and Swamp Music Second Hand in Tampere, my favourite second-hand music shops: CDs and vinyl galore. I can sit in the main building of my university, Tampereen Yliopisto, and probably see 10 metalheads walk past me within an hour, no problem. Every Christmas season there is a musical event called Raskasta Joulua, which roughly translates to Heavy Christmas, which is a bunch of well-known Finnish metal musicians, including Marco Hietala of Nightwish, Tarot, and Northern Kings, Tony Kakko of Sonata Arctica and Northern Kings, Ilja Jalkenen, ex-Kiuas, Ari Koivunen of Amoral, JP Leppäluoto of Northern Kings, Harmaja, Charon, and ex-Poisonblack, as well as a host of other Finnish musicians, singing Christmas tunes with a metal twist. They do quite a few shows in Finland and they get a huge turnout. I went to one of the Helsinki shows back in December 2011 (it's so popular that they have to do two shows in Helsinki) and it was fantastic. It really showed how metal is pretty mainstream in Finland because among the metalheads there were business people in suits and ties and other "ordinary" people who you'd never see at a metal show in any other country. In fact, I think this is the perfect example of just how metal Finland is. Maybe it’s because Finland is quite a small country compared to Canada, in both geography and population, so everything is a bit more concentrated here. Unlike in other countries where the top 40 radio playlist are lacking in metal-ness, in Finland, it’s perfectly normal to hear one of the many Finnish metal acts on mainstream radio and to know loads of people who are into metal bands across all age groups. If metal is a subculture of outsiders, I think they can find a home in Finland. 

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