Story by Carl Begai
Pics by Jere Hietala
“I think we’ve played New York more times than we’ve played any city in Finland.”
Which pretty much sums up the life of Finnish folk metal outfit Ensiferum, who have gone in a couple short years from being just another name on Finland’s mile-long roster of bands to one of the country’s increasingly popular exports. At the time of this writing Ensiferum was wrapping up their second North American tour of 2009 in support of their latest album, From Afar, still riding the wave generated in 2007 with the Victory Songs record. From where bassist / clean vocalist Sami Hinkka stands there’s no sign of things slowing down in the forseeable future, and he’s betting on at least one more return to North America before From Afar has officially run its course. There’s no place like home after all, and the doors in this part of the world have been ripped off their hinges where Ensiferum is concerned.
“I remember when we did an Eastern Canada tour a few years back (2007), before any of our albums were officially released there,” says Hinkka. “I was expecting having maybe 50 people in the audience each night. Just some metalheads coming to check out a band from Finland. Our first gig – I think it was in Montreal – was sold out. We were blown away by that, and it ended up that four of the six shows we did on that tour were sold out. It was a huge surprise to discover that we had a huge fanbase without having any albums out there. The North American fans are insane so it’s always an hour to come back.”
“Summer Slaughter this year was great as well,” he adds. “We were like the white sheep of that tour (laughs) because every other band except Blackguard was death metal. That was a really good opportunity for us to make a bridge and get some new fans.”
Touring has become a way of life for Ensiferum yet they managed to get From Afar done and on the shelves within two years in spite of living out of suitcases and on catering. No surprise, then, that most of the writing for the album took place on the road.
“We started talking about making the new album at the end of last year, when we were on tour with Amon Amarth and Belphegor,” says Hinkka. “Me and Markus (Toivonen / guitars) sat in the back lounge of the tour bus with a mini-Marshall amp, jamming stuff and recording it on my phone (laughs). A lot of those melodies and riffs ended up on From Afar because we had so much material by the end of the tour. We finally convinced Markus to quit his day job when we got back home, and we worked on the new songs every day. Eight to 10 hours every day. Markus kept writing, sometimes getting only three hours of sleep at night, to the point I thought he was going to burn out (laughs). It was insane.”
With folk metal being as trendy as it is – and Ensiferum considered one of the acts that launched said popularity contest – the band is conscious of the need to evolve with each new record. From Afar sticks to the established Ensiferum formula, but there are some unexpected twists along the way. Turisas-flavoured battle metal bombast for starters…
“You can’t be a metalhead in Finland without knowing about the metal scene,” says Hinkka, addressing the band’s popularity, “but I did an interview where a woman asked me if I was surprised by the number of Finnish bands influenced by Ensiferum, and I was like ‘Who?’ (laughs). I’m not trying to be a rockstar, but I’m a lazy bastard when it comes to stuff like that. I don’t pay attention. Every album is made up of the stuff that we like to listen to, so obviously we’re going to sound a bit like them. The trick is to add your own elements to that sound. In ‘Twight Tavern’, for example, you understand why that female vocal part is there if you read the lyrics. I actually wrote that part, and I told Markus that if it ever made it onto the album I wanted female vocals there because the song is about a warrior who dies in battle, and the Valkyries come to take him to Heaven.”
“I don’t see any point doing the same album over again; if it ever gets to that point we should quit. We didn’t really think about what we were doing for the new album, we just concentrated on what sounded good to us. On ‘Stone Cold Metal’ there are a few melodies in the bridge that are totally not ordinary metal things (laughs). It was like ‘This is the melody and it fits the mood of the song, so fuck it if someone doesn’t like it, we’re using it.’ We don’t really care or think about what worked for us in the past. I think it’s good to try and stay connected to the 15 year old guy who’s never heard us before instead of thinking ‘Yeah, the last album sold really well and people really seem to like this and that song…’ I think working that way is just wrong.”
Line-up changes have been common within the Ensiferum camp since their inception in 1995. Perhaps the most significant was the sacking of vocalist Jari Mäenpää (Wintersun) in 2003 – supposedly due to his lack of interest in touring – and the entrance of current frontman Peter Lindroos, but 2007 saw the unexpected departure of long-time keyboardist Meiju Enho. Her tour replacement, Emmi Silvennoinen, was made an official band member during the recording of From Afar, while Lindroos’ other band Norther – which he founded in 1996 – gave him the boot earlier this year in the interest of staying active. Asked if having a solid roster for the past two years influenced From Afar’s sound, Hinkka shrugs it off as business-as-usual.
“Not really. Emmi had played about 200 gigs with us by the time we started recording this album, and we never had any problems with Petri being a part of Ensiferum and Norther at the same time. It’s much easier for us to arrange tours now that he’s not with Norther, but when he was with them we communicated with the band all the time to make sure that we didn’t fuck up each other’s schedules. It was their decision to kick him out of Norther, which helped us, but I was sad that he got kicked out of the band that he founded.”
It was bound to happen, though, especially given Ensiferum’s visibility over the last two years. Lindroos was an old hand at successfully dealing with scheduling conflicts, but it was clear to some that the arrangement was detrimental in the end.
“He was totally surprised,” Hinkka says of Lindroos’ firing. “I was with him when he got the news. We were actually in the studio working on some demos and it totally killed the mood. It was like ‘What the fuck?’ for everybody at the time. There’s no bad blood between Ensiferum and Norther, though. They have a new singer and, well… it’s their loss. But sorry, no drama here (laughs).”
ENSIFERUM on the net:
www.ensiferum.com
myspace.com/ensiferum
