from Middle Eastern music styles" with traditional elements coming from both Jewish and Arabic folk music. Acclaimed as "one of the world's most unique and trailblazing heavy metal bands," Orphaned Land's style of music has since been dubbed oriental metal. Melechesh formed in Jerusalem in 1995, becoming "undoubtedly the first overtly anti-Christian band to exist in one of the holiest cities in the world." Melechesh began as a straightforward black metal act with their first foray into folk metal occurring on the title track of their 1996 EP The Siege of Lachish. Their subsequent albums saw the group straddling the boundaries between black, death, and thrash metal, with "impressive, tastefully rendered epics chock-full of superb riffs, Middle Eastern melodies, and vocal exchanges varying from a throaty midrange screech to chanting." Other oriental metal acts emerged thereafter with the band Distorted emerging in 1996 as the first female-fronted metal act from Israel. Additional oriental metal bands emerged form the Middle East in the 2000s, such as Myrath from Tunisia, who mix Middle Eastern and Arabic melodies with power metal and progressive rock. The Kordz from Lebanon combine Middle Eastern instrumentation with politicized lyrics. Lazywall from Morocco and Andaz Uzzal from Algeria combine that region's traditional music forms with heavy metal. Egypt's Massive Scar Era includes several female members, who have reported harassment due to their participation in heavy metal music. Development From the middle of the 1990s, other bands gradually emerged to combine heavy metal with folk music. Storm was a short lived Norwegian supergroup with Fenriz, Satyr and Kari Rueslåtten from the black metal groups Darkthrone, Satyricon and the doom metal band The 3rd and the Mortal respectively. Their only album Nordavind was released in 1995 with the use of keyboards to imitate the sound of folk instruments. The Germans Empyrium also relied on synthesizers and guitars to deliver their "dark folklore" black metal music with the release of their 1996 debut album A Wintersunset... The year 1996 also saw the debut album of the "one-man black metal project of multi-instrumentalist Vratyas Vakyas" from Germany known as Falkenbach. Even though Falkenbach was formed as early as 1989, the band didn't get much attention until the debut, that includes epic music that is "rife with keyboards, Viking themes, and folk music tendencies," Falkenbach was effectively a merge of Viking metal with folk metal. They were joined in the next two years