Artist Spotlight: Alamaailman Vasarat

The Hammers of the Underworld

It’s amazing how much of the early Dreadnoughts sound came from me just searching for the word “polka” on Limewire.

For you younglings, Limewire was a site you could just connect to and search for networked music before the music industry really started to clamp down on that sort of thing. So you got access to… basically whatever MP3s were on some random collection of hard drives all over the world. I got the tune for “Black Sea Gale” via this search, for example, some weird old polka that Jimmy Sturr had recorded ended up on tinygreenelf929’s hard drive and on our album. The beauty of the early digital age.

These were the glory days. I was auto-downloading everything with the word “polka” in it.

And one day, someone had decided to put the phrase “Finnish Polka” beside a song called Lentävä Mato by a band called Alamaiilman Vasarat. I still don’t know how to pronounce that name and I never will and I don’t care. And after about 45 minutes of download time, I managed to play the song. And “Lentävä Mato” kind of changed my world:

WHAAAAAAAAT?????? Yeah, definitely not a “polka”, but thank god there are people out there who don’t really know what polka is.

I immediately burned it to one of our “Van” cds for the early tours and I will never forget the band’s reaction. We all kind of collectively gasped at the sheer audacity of this sound. You’ve been plodding along in 2009 doing basically decent Flogging Molly-inspired songs that aren’t really going anywhere interesting, and then… BAM. Lentava fucking Mato. Marco the drummer demanded that we play it on repeat for a while as he sat in the back of the Dodge Grand Caravan and drank beer after beer, eyes wide, hands drumming endlessly on his meaty Swiss thighs.

The band asked for more. I went back and burned a couple of albums.

It’s been amazing to watch newer members of the Dreadnoughts hear this band in the van and just kind of go: huh. WOW. It happens every time, and that’s because we have always been blessed with folks who can hear the power and precision and potential behind the mighty Alamaiilman Vasarat. They travelled to places that almost no-one travels, and they left an incredible string of recordings. If you have a long drive and want to enter an amazing headspace, put on their album Mahaan.

Those of you paying close attention will notice that we tried (and kind of failed) to replicate this band’s amazing sound with our Goblin Humppa:

But listening to this now it feels too formulaic, too uncreative, too repetitive to count as anything like the magic that A.V. put together. Oh, well.

And, by the way, this is a band with a name that translates to… wait for this… “The Hammers of the Underworld”. I mean come on. They were called many things; “metal”, “avant garde” “klezmer thrash”, but really there was no category for this. They were their own category. To pair up a clarinet and a cello and a trombone and a reed organ and a drum kit and get mosh pits going at clubs and festivals is a very unique accomplishment.

I don’t know much about who they were or where they came from, but I’m sad to report that their founder and visionary leader Jarno Sarkula passed away in the summer of 2020. Far too young, only 47. I mean look at this fucking king.

Fly on forever, Jarno, you were one of those rare people that makes the world an incredibly interesting place.