Warthur
Looking at the cover to Manala, I think to myself "this album prominently features a man playing a tambourine for a volcano swan. Can the album possibly live up to this?" My answer is a pleasantly surprised "yeah, kind of!" Finnish folk metal crew Korpiklaani do a great job of incorporating jaunty folk music (particularly polka) into their sound on the album without dimming the raw power and aggression of the metal basis of their sound. Combinations of folk music and metal which don't either ride roughshod over the folk music or castrate the metal are difficult to pull off, and the band succeed well enough. It's not a po-faced, serious artistic statement by any stretch of the imagination - it's a playful polka-metal party, and by that metric it is fun enough. 2CD editions of the album offer the tracks in English language versions or the original Finnish.