Wow. Just wow.

Tom just made me listen to the Progressive Folk Metal station on last.fm. It’s fucking rad. Make sure you read the descriptions.

Orphaned Land is a progressive metal band from Israel. It combines oriental elements and Jewish tradition with slow doom/death metal. Orphaned Land is in the core a doom/death band, but it was highly influenced by the folk music and tradition of the Oriental Jews (Mizraḥim), making their sound much more progessive than typical doom/death bands. Their album Sahara (1994) was the first to include a combination of death metal and traditional oriental music. In their second album El Norra Alila (1996), Orphaned Land elaborated the combination of metal and oriental music, including the addition of song with traditional oriental Jewish piyyut and Arab melodies.

Wow.