Music Review! Velimor “Ancestry”

In a bar in Philadelphia the other night, someone asked me if I belong to Aryan Nation. The answer is no. The Libertarian Party and the NRA yes, not the Aryan Nation. There’s a lot about white nationalist ideology that is hard to swallow, ultimately. The white nationalist movement have produced some noteworthy bands over the years, that’s about as much as I can give them. There’s one musican who played with the Beatles, Elvis and the Rolling Stones- his name is Phil Spector and he’s in prison for shooting a woman in the head. No one is taking Let It Be of the shelf. The neo-Nazi thing for a lot of those bands floats around as a vague ideology, I don’t know how much actual violence a lot of those bands have in fact carried out.
Velimor is a Russian band that’s been around about ten years from what the internet tells me. They appear to be neo-Nazis, actually they make no real bones about that, they have a cover of the song “Rudolph Hess” by the skinhead band Honor on YouTube. The first I was made aware of the band was by their appearance on the Folk Metal edition of the excellent Metalhit Free Download Series put out late ‘10-early ‘11. In the language of obscure metal subcategories they are described as Neo-Pagan Folk Metal. The first track on their album Ancestry wouldn’t even identify them as a metal band. The first track is a nice little instrumental with some nice acoustic guitar playing is all. The metal kicks in on track 2. Velimor is one of those places where the whole terminology of subcategories used to describe metal becomes silly because I would be hard pressed to define the band as folk metal as opposed to black metal much of the time. I think they are categorized as folk metal rather then black metal, because they have the faux medieval flute that comes in every once and awhile. How hateful are the lyrics? I can’t tell they’re in Russian. Its some decent music, but then again I don’t know what kind of drugs you’d have to take to be able to listen to hours and hours of it. Possibly, they are attracted to some notion of Slavic history. Whether or not that Slavic past existed as they imagine it might be another question. At the end of the album it circles back into the purely acoustic guitar and flute type stuff. It is a fair album, for 8 bucks on amazon it’s worth it, if you’re into folk metal.
There is a lot of very strange metal out there. I don’t know how long it would me to get through all the weird little black metal and doom metal bands that have happened over the years, all the weird little gothic metal bands from Finland alone could just keep going and going. People are very excited about this collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica, but I have a feeling it isn’t going to be that different from what bands like Voivod, Earth, Circle or Celtic Frost have been doing for years, or even further into the kind of obscure black metal or doom metal you might find on webpage like Metalhit or in some of the French Canadian music stores I’ve been in. I’ll keep writing about that kind of thing, too. That’s because it gets hits. People are still looking up the Akitsa, Silencer, and Celtic Frost reviews. The metal reviews and the horror film reviews have done quite well.