All hail the Mongolian warriors of heavy metal
Pop
Google Translate tells me their lyrics dwell on ancestor veneration, horses and Genghis Khan
The Hu
Electric Ballroom, London NW1
★★★★★
The Hu are the biggest Mongolian throat-singing heavy metal band in the world. To be fair, it’s a niche genre. A quartet of classically trained musicians from Ulaanbaatar, The Hu have ripped through the usually sedate enclaves of world music by amping up the droning melodies of their eastern folk culture with the pummelling drums and electric thunder of Western hard rock.
Travelogue videos that make Mongolia look like a setting for a sci-fi apocalypse have attracted tens of millions of views. Their debut album,
The Gereg, reached number 21 in the UK last year (number 2 in the specialist
Rock and Metal chart). Elton John has declared himself a fan, which is when you really know you have made it into the mainstream. They’ll be duetting with Ed Sheeran before long.
They certainly looked the part amid the dry ice and stroboscopic lights of the Electric Ballroom in Camden, where many a grizzly rock band has trod the boards before them. Dressed in robes of beaten black leather adorned with dangling accoutrements, long hair in top knots and ornamental braids, they looked like a gang of marauding warriors bent on dealing death and destruction. Which, let’s face it, is a look most heavy metal fans aspire to anyway.
With four touring musicians supplying a basic rock chug of drums, percussion, bass and electric guitar, The Hu themselves play souped-up traditional instruments. Two members (who go by the Westernised names Gala and Enkush) saw away on electrified morin khuurs (a two-string horsehead fiddle), one thrashes a tovshuur (a three-string lute), and frontman Nyamjantsan Galsanjamts (aka Jaya) sets up a quivering tone on a Jew’s harp and occasionally whips out a long thin wooden flute (known as a tsuur), wielding it with an aggression that helps distract from its tootling tones. Clearly these are not instruments normally found in a heavy rock setting, and they have a resonance and warmth at odds with this usually abrasive genre.
All four members of The Hu are masters of the art of Mongolian throat singing, in which vocalists use the mouth as a kind of echo-chamber to create multiple microtones. It made for a low, resonant sound not a million miles removed from the kind of guttural barking heard in a lot of contemporary metal, but with more appealing musicality as voices blended into a thick wall of vibrating notes. The fact that all songs were sung in their native tongue proved no impediment to an English audience chanting along with internet hit Yuve Yuve Yu, which translates as “How Strange, How Strange”.
With the aid of Google Translate,
I can reveal that The Hu’s lyrics tend to dwell on ancestor veneration, horses (lots of songs about horses) and the longed-for return of ancient warlord Genghis Khan. “Born with the undeniable fate to gather nations, the Lord Chinggis declares his name on earth … Oh black banner, be awakened/ Oh the Khanate (royal power) rise and rise forever.” How strange, how strange, indeed, although perhaps no stranger than Western metal’s usual satanic and apocalyptic obsessions.
With the backbeat often settling into a kind of chunky gallop (it’s those horses again) rather than the dramatic punch and elaborate interplay of Western metal, there is a suspicion that stripped of its aesthetic styling and top knot headbanging, what we were really being treated to was a rambunctious folk-rock jig. Not so much Genghis Zeppelin as a Mongol Pogues throwing a hooley on the steppes. But that is not a criticism. As world music concerts go, The Hu’s inspired take on stale rock tropes was a galloping triumph.