What's all this fuss about?

Latin lyrics in Heavy Metal music are a common phenomenon. The darker the music, the more evil the band wanna be. What's better than using an old, mysterious, hardly understandable, cryptic, medieval and therefore almost satanic language? Unfortunately bands seldom know how to use this language properly. So, instead of evoking the demons of the realm of evil, they just evoke a hop-frog. Clatu verata nicto! - The most of you know what happened after this wrongly spoken spell.

Normally, two questions are the result of the fact that you've just read a latin phrase:
- What does it mean? (almost everybody)
- Is it correct? (just a few latin aficionados)

This page doesn't want to make fun of mistakes in latin lyrics. I wanna answer the first question to everybody who is interested. The second question is just for myself or for the two or three weird guys out there or for bands which are thinking about using a latin phrase as well. You can contact me if you want.

Freitag, 24. August 2012

Eïs - Lykoi

Eïs - Kainsmal (2011)

Today, a little bit of Ancient Greek. On "Kainsmal", there is a song called Lykoi. This means wolves in English (and, by the way, "Ulver" in Norwegian). The song starts with the words Outo pos exei kardian lykou periplanate monaxos - He who has the heart of a wolf inside of him, wanders alone.

Maybe you already know that the band started under the name Geïst (German for ghost) but that they had to change their name due to an alternative rock band with the same name. So they quitted the first and last letter and got Eïs. This is a German word as well and means Ice (the German counterpart is pronounced like the English word). But for having two dots (and I don't thing that they are röck döts) there is a second way of pronouncing this word - like a combination of the sounds of the "e" from "end" and "ese" from "these". Now you have a Latin word which means to them, for them.

I don't know if the band knows this or if it was the band's intention, but nevertheless: If you want to see it, you get another starting-point for your interpretations.

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