The Hu - Rumble of Thunder (2022)

Country: Mongolia
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Sep 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

This album is aptly named because Mongolia's best known musical export are rather like a rumble of thunder, initially heard somewhere over the horizon but who keep coming ominously closer till they're right in your face. What they do tends to be called folk metal, but it's mostly world music, heavier than the norm but not massively so. It's just that the aggression in their sound fits so well with the metal genre, because everything feels like a challenge, even if it isn't.

I loved their first album, The Gereg, and I loved them on YouTube before that, through the videos that went so effectively viral, songs like Wolf Totem and Yuve Yuve Yu. I hoped to catch them live in Phoenix last year and then this year, because they keep coming through town, but I had to enjoy a little vicariously through my son, who saw them while I was in England. He reported back that they were excellent and bought me a Hu shirt, which was much appreciated.

This is at once a better and a worse album than The Gereg, mostly because it's more consistent in approach. If you want an hour of the Hu bellowing at you, then you're not going to complain at all, because they start out doing that with This is Mongol, continue doing that in Yut Hovende and, for all intents and purposes, rarely stop doing that throughout the album, even when they cool their jets on more peaceful songs like Mother Nature. They're just naturally aggressive, even when the thinking is welcoming and open, and they play that up.

In fact, when they calm down a little and write pieces of music that could be considered songs, not just chants and challenges, they feel more mature than ever. Triangle is the first of these, because it has a serious bounce to it. It's almost alternative rock, but with jaw harp and throat singing. I'm very fond of it, once I got used to its friendly approach after the opening pair of musical threats. I like Teach Me too, which has a similar bounce but also adds a Celtic flavour behind its aggression. There's more of that Celtic feel on Bii Biyelgee, especially when it speeds up at the end into what could be considered a jig.

My favourite songs come late on, because the album is beat heavy. Everything drives forward and much of that is due to the drums, which are high in the mix, but every instrument plays along in an overtly rhythmic fashion, including the vocals. I wanted a lot more of the fiddles, especially given that two of the primary four musicians, Gala and Enkush, play them. However, with a few notable exceptions, like Black Thunder, they almost hide in the background. They're there and they sound great, but they're a background texture rather than a lead instrument.

Black Thunder does allow these horsehead fiddles to run loose and dominate for a little while like soloing electric guitars. I enjoyed everything here, especially the throat singing on Sell the World, but the album came alive for me in the second half, with the nine minute Black Thunder kicking off in style with patient morin khuur against a vocal drone and continuing to build, its sound getting progressively heavier as the song evolves. It feels like a complete song, as if the band deliberately chose to develop it further than the more simple, albeit highly effective, chant songs.

And that goes double for the closing couple of gems, Shihi Hutu and Tatar Warrior, which are the most complete songs here, to my thinking. There's plenty of that aggressive chant in the former, but the song develops with riffs, power chords and interesting transitions, as if it's a wild cover of a Led Zeppelin song we've never heard before. Black Thunder is more immediate but I think this is my favourite song here. It even has plenty of that wailing morin khuur that I crave so much. Tatar Warrior is more like a Metallica song and they've covered a couple of them in their time. This is a tribute in different form, but just as enjoyable.

The catch to ending so well is that it's easy to see that not everything stands up to the closing pair, so I think I have to go with a 7/10 this time. It's still a really good album and I wonder which angles they show here are going to be the ones that they follow most diligently in the future. Triangle is toe-tapping commercial fun but I hope they get more progressive the way that Black Thunder and Shihi Hutu do. Only time will tell. And when are they coming to town again? I can't miss them every time through.

Nine Treasures - Awakening from Dukkha (2021)

Country: Mongolia
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I don't usually review compilation albums at Apocalypse Later, because there's far too much good new music to talk about instead. I'll make an exception here, though, for three primary reasons.

One is that I'd be shocked if many of you have heard the first three albums by Nine Treasures, who are a Mongolian folk metal band currently based in Beijing, China. They were formed in 2010, as were the far more prolific and sadly now disbanded Tengger Cavalry. That's six years before the Hu, who were a lot of people's introduction to Mongolian folk metal, but six years after Hanggai, a folk punk band of renown, who built on the folk music traditions of bands like Huun-Huur Tu and Altan Urag. And yes, if you're interested in Mongolian folk music, all these bands are well worth checking out.

Another is that, if you decided to seek those three albums out now, you wouldn't be able to find them, as the band weren't happy with the recording quality and pulled them from Bandcamp. All you'll find is this compilation, which features twelve songs taken from those earlier three albums but recorded afresh by the current line-up of the band in consistent style and with consistent production.

And that means that, for three, to the mind of the band members, this is a new album as much as it's a compilation, one that certainly looks to the past but also celebrates a rebirth, one that reflects the band as it is today and one that they can use as the bedrock from which to move forward. So, if this is new music both to Nine Treasures and to you, it fits here. My mission at Apocalypse Later is discovery and covering this album would seem to meet that.

If your exposure to Mongolian folk metal is, like most people in the west, limited to the Hu, you'll find that Nine Treasures are faster, heavier and more metallic, but just as inherently rooted in folk music. Just check out the opener to this album, Black Heart, which has guitars as crunchy as in the Hu's cover of Sad But True, but feels more like a speed metal playing a jig. The song doesn't stay that fast, but it isn't an unusual speed for them and they stay this heavy throughout, meaning that they often sound as similar to a band like Korpiklaani as one like the Hu.

Like most Mongolian metal, this features delicate finger picking strings and a bowed instrument that sounds kind of like a violin playing over the crunchy metal riffs that underpin everything. The latter is a morin khuur, a massively important instrument in Mongolia that we would call a horse head fiddle. I doubt you'll find much Mongolian music that doesn't feature at least one of these in their group. The former, however, isn't the tovshuur, or western Mongolian lute, that the Hu use, but a balalaika, which adds a neat touch to their sound.

And, over the top, of course, are the rough vocals that most Mongolian metal bands have. There's not as much in the way of throat singing here as other bands but four out of the five members sing as well as play their chosen instruments and they all sing in Mongolian. Their voices are clear and clean but in varying degrees of harsh texture and often deep. There are hints of drone and lots of rolling Rs, so it's very recognisably Mongolian singing. If you were enthused by the vocals on the Hu's Wolf Totem, you will be very much at home here.

What surprised me is that my favourite songs come from all three of the band's source albums for this compilation. Only two songs here come from their 2012 debut, Arvan Ald Guulin Honshoor, but I adore that album's title track, which is very much like a Mongolian Korpiklaani. Six are sourced from 2013's Nine Treasures, including the bookends: the frantic Black Heart and the more bouncy Three Years Old Warrior. I particularly like The Dream About Ancient City, which is a classy instrumental. That leaves a quartet from their 2017 album Wisdom Eyes, which all have opportunities for the balalaika, including its gloriously subtle title track and The End of the World, which features an excellent intro.

I can't remember how I got introduced to Mongolian metal. It certainly wasn't the Hu, because it was much earlier. I was a fan of Huun-Huur Tu and some YouTube algorithm showed me something heavier, probably either Tengger Cavalry or Nine Treasures. Like most people, I haven't looked back since, and this is a great way to be introduced to Nine Treasures. I hope it serves as the rebirth they so richly deserve and that they're soon on as many people's radars as the Hu and for many of the same reasons. Hey, they covered Metallica in 2012, with their debut album including their take on For Whom the Bell Tolls. The world's just catching up to them.

The Hu - The Gereg (2019)

Country: Mongolia
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 13 Sep 2019
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Well, I've been waiting for this one for a long time! I've mentioned before that my immediate wish for folk metal, when it became a thing, was for it to traverse the globe and trawl in all sorts of farflung cultures. I couldn't be happier that that's exactly what it's done. It reached Mongolia before the Hu and I adored watching Tengger Cavalry live in Mesa a few years ago. I hope to catch the Hu in Phoenix in early October. They've achieved something even trickier than making a good album though; they went viral on YouTube. I saw a lot of friends, varied and not all music fans, sharing the Hu's videos.

While this is still folk metal, it's a lot more tribal and a lot less metal than Tengger Cavalry or others I've found, like Nine Treasures and Hanggai. The band call what they do "Hunnu Rock", because they take inspiration from the Hunnu or Xiongnu, a powerful empire of nomads who ruled Central Asia a couple of thousand years ago. This is often very militaristic, one of those viral hits, Wolf Totem, constructed from warlike chants. It's so vehemently antagonistic that it could almost be a Maori haka. Even if you haven't seen the video, your imagination will create one very like it from the music.

Of course, anyone stumbling on Mongolian metal will hear a lot of new sounds that they haven't heard before, most obviously the throat singing technique, which I've adored ever since I first heard Huun-Huur Tu a couple of decades ago. Throat singers are able to create two very distinct notes at the same time, usually a really low drone and a high melodic trill.

Also, with the exception of the drums, the instruments are wildly different from what we're used to. Enkush and Gala play the morin khuur, or horsehead fiddle, usually played upright like a smaller cello. Jaya plays a jaw harp and flutes like the tsuur. Temka plays the tovshuur, a two stringed guitar. The result is something much more exotic than Celtic or Finnish folk metal, even the Andean stuff I'm enjoying so much of late.

What the Hu do differently from Tengger Cavalry and the others is let their traditional instrumentation drive everything so that this is less folk metal and more folk music that's just darker and heavier than would usually be the case. I could easily imagine Korpiklaani performing around a campfire in a forest, but they'd have amps to plug into and a full drumkit. The Hu don't seem to need that. They could simply walk up to that fire, perform and then climb on their horses and ride off to find another fire.

Some songs are more vicious. The morin khuur on The Same gets far closer to metal guitar soloing. The beat on Yuve Yuve Yu and the title track are given by western drums. There's a lot of metal in the intensity of The Great Chinggis Khaan. However, the majority of songs here are world music rather than any intensity of rock music, only some of which manage to walk in both worlds. The Legend of Mother Swan, for instance, is delicate but it carries a powerful intent behind it, courtesy of those tribal chants and drums. It is beautiful music. I fell into Song of Women, the seven minute closer and enjoyed it for what seemed like hours.

Fortunately, I'm a big fan of world music, whether rocked up or not, and I know that I'll be listening to this a lot because it fits perfectly in both worlds. The moods it invokes are powerful and I'm talking the grooves that the songs find, not just the evocative intros like the flute that kicks off Shoog Shoog. And I wonder if that will help or hinder the Hu. Viral culture is a finicky creature. They aren't going to get thirty million views for each video. They're going to fade away somewhat. However, they deserve to remain known because they're astoundingly good and should be listened to for their quality as much as for their exotic nature to mainstream audiences.