One of my cousins — a music buff and a passionate critic of my column — rang me up to ask if I had heard any Finnish rock band. Much to his disappointment, I could name only one, The Rasmus. He said I should listen to Strum und Drang, a young band that was gaining popularity across Europe and Scandinavia.

Viva la YouTube, Strum und Drang played on my desktop for that day. Their two albums, Learning to Rock and Rock ‘n’ Roll Children are unmistakably metal. And the clarity of the words through all that turned-up guitar amp impressed me. It was clean heavy metal that expressed extreme emotions — love and breaking free.

War, fantasy and death — things that make you visualise Beowulf ripping off Grendel’s arm in the 2007 movie Beowulf — are what most metal bands sing about. The Europeans, especially Scandinavians, dig metal because they relate to the severe cold, months of living in darkness and their innate Viking instincts.

What’s interesting about this young band is their name. Strum und Drang used to be a literary movement that advocated the expression of extreme emotions at a time when restraint was thought to be a virtue. But many German writers and philosophers of the late 18th century gave violent expression to emotions — sometimes frightening, sometimes poignant. The band’s genre and its name couldn’t have been a mere coincidence.

The name reminds me of the American band, The Doors. Jim Morrison named his psychedelic rock band after Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. The founder member of the band was drawn to literature and poetry, and when he read that book he struck gold. Aldous Huxley believed the use of Mescaline, a drug would unlock the door to inaccessible religious experience and Morrison couldn’t have agreed more.

The Doors took their name very seriously, and it went on to embody Huxley’s philosophy. Morrison put down his ‘experience’ into his songs and performance. When you’re listening to their music, it sends you in a state of trance. No wonder then that many lost their minds in the shows. Riders on the storm is one example, and there are many more. It wasn’t for nothing that he was called the American poet among fans.

His routine Ghost Dance added to his mystical stage persona. It was mostly a drug-stimulated experience that he brought to the stage and in his lyrics. The Doors is now a synonym for psychedelic metal. In a way, it lived up to its name.