Originally Posted by Trollheart

Turisas are a viking or folk metal band from Finland, and actually I featured this very album in the section “What's that all about?” last year, mentioning this very track and discounting it with a sneer. Now I find myself featuring it. Ah, how the mighty have fallen, or something. Well, in my defence, there's no way this song would be accepted as any kind of viking metal, and that's what I was all about (as it were) in Metal Month II. But this is Metal Month III, and this is what we're about at this point, so let's give it a fighting chance.

“Rasputin” by Turisas, from the album The Varangian Way, 2007.
Originally by Boney M, from the album Nightflight to Venus, 1978.
Written by Fred Jay, Frank Farian and Goerge Reyam.

Yeah, that one. The one everyone sings as soon as they're drunk enough at the Christmas party. The one that gets murdered at every karaoke party you've ever been to. The one whose lyric nobody remembers other than “Ra ra Rasputin!” It's a damn silly song to begin with, but then whoever said Boney M were ever about anything but fun and having a good time? What do Turisas do with it?

They certainly speed it up, as you would probably expect, and give it a kind of folk twist, which again is their forte. The chorus is roared, which is funny but also predictable, and the drums just go wild on it. Think someone's playing an accordion or fiddle or something there in the background. The spoken middle eighth has a very viking feel about it, and to make it even funnier (and somehow more authentic and true to the original) Turisas shot the video in a disco. Man, those Russians, huh?

Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.