Music / Reviews
Live Review: Finntroll, Fleece
Why wait for the third Hobbit movie when you can have the full folk-metal troll experience at the Fleece on an autumnal Sunday night? We haven’t seen this many funny prosthetics on a Bristol stage since that little Mortiis fella played the Bierkeller a few years back, before retreating mysteriously to his Norwegian mountaintop lair. The audience certainly seemed eager to join in, though curiously enough it was mainly the ladies who sported stick-on ears.
Of course, this would just be so much gimmickry if the music wasn’t up to scratch. But despite an ever-shifting line-up, Finntroll (who, as Scando-pedants will be quick to observe, hail from Finland but sing in Swedish) have produced a remarkably distinctive and consistent body of work, with one big hairy foot in black metal and the other in Finnish humppa folk dance music, whose pulse-quickeningly furious bpm proves a perfect match.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of fan favourite Nattfodd. So on their first visit to Bristol, Finntroll serve up the whole glorious album in sequence, from Manniskopesten to Grottans Barn. The downside of this approach is that the magnificent singalong Trollhammaren is dispatched way too early in the set. Fortunately there’s plenty more where that came from, and the likes of Solsagan from Nifelvind keep the audience dancing a merry jig. Vocalist Matthias Lillmans is clearly having a fine old time, shimmying around the stage and draping his arm around guitarist Mikael Karlbom in Bowie/Ronson style, which might have seemed a tad homoerotic had these not been two Viking gents clad as mythical beasts. Keyboardist Aleksi Verta does much of the heavy lifting in the background, replicating the accordion and trumpets that fill out Finntroll’s recorded sound. There’s additional fun to be had in hearing a Bristolian audience attempting to pronounce the song titles as they shout out for their favourites, though the bloke who was desperate to hear Jaktens Tid was finally rewarded.
is needed now More than ever
They don’t bother with the formalities of an encore, launching straight into Skogsdotter, the parptastic Haxbrydg and fleet-footed Under Bergets Rot. Remarkably, despite all that furious headbanging on stage, only bassist Sami Uusitalko loses his ears in the melee.
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