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DoomMetalAlchemist
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 7:47 am 
 

Gravetemplar wrote:
Not pissed, genuinely amused by metal fans always finding double standards to justify weird shit. I'm pretty sure in a few years from now some people will claim in reality black metal was created in the 60s by some obscure surfer rock band that used a lot of tremolos and some distortion pedals. A lot of metal without distortion just sounds like the Beach Boys after all.


This is all of course completely ignoring that Mercyful was actually considered black metal when the term black metal was originally coined for genre purposes, but ok.

Tell me, what key features do, say, Saint Vitus and Esoteric share?

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Gravetemplar
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 7:47 am 
 

Morn Of Solace wrote:
Gravetemplar wrote:
Not pissed, genuinely amused by metal fans always finding double standards to justify weird shit. I'm pretty sure in a few years from now some people will claim in reality black metal was created in the 60s by some obscure surfer rock band that used a lot of tremolos and some distortion pedals. A lot of metal without distortion just sounds like the Beach Boys after all.


I've already seen people unironically tracing it back to Cromagnon's Caledonia, we already live in the future!

Proto-industrial folk black metal! Can't wait for folks to find out all the ambient and electronic music Burzum recorded was ripped off from 70's and 80's krautrock bands. Tangerine Dream were the first ambient black metal band.

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King_of_Arnor
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 8:17 am 
 

Gravetemplar wrote:
Morn Of Solace wrote:
Gravetemplar wrote:
Not pissed, genuinely amused by metal fans always finding double standards to justify weird shit. I'm pretty sure in a few years from now some people will claim in reality black metal was created in the 60s by some obscure surfer rock band that used a lot of tremolos and some distortion pedals. A lot of metal without distortion just sounds like the Beach Boys after all.


I've already seen people unironically tracing it back to Cromagnon's Caledonia, we already live in the future!

Proto-industrial folk black metal! Can't wait for folks to find out all the ambient and electronic music Burzum recorded was ripped off from 70's and 80's krautrock bands. Tangerine Dream were the first ambient black metal band.


Before Burzum, the opening track off Mayhem's Deathcrush EP was provided by Conrad Schnitzler, who was also briefly a member of Tangerine Dream. Maybe you're onto something here!
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Empyreal
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:14 am 
 

Gravetemplar wrote:
Not pissed, genuinely amused by metal fans always finding double standards to justify weird shit. I'm pretty sure in a few years from now some people will claim in reality black metal was created in the 60s by some obscure surfer rock band that used a lot of tremolos and some distortion pedals. A lot of metal without distortion just sounds like the Beach Boys after all.


Well genres all had to start somewhere - none of them were fully formed in the early 80s. I don't really get your point about going further and further back - people like to trace these things, sure, but there's obviously a difference between Alice Cooper and Mercyful Fate. I think we talked about this in another thread regarding Motorhead and Venom. If you want to say they're not BM in the way it was in the 90s and on, sure - but it's not like there's no difference between any of these old bands or that there weren't clear decisive steps taken in more extreme directions. I don't think you mean it this way, but the ones who talk about how ludicrous it is to call MF and Venom black metal just sound like they're trying to keep the genre a very narrow thing as if it just sprouted out of nowhere.

I think genres are pretty fluid and it's often blurry exactly where the line is. And things change over time and people retroactively label stuff all the time. And maybe I just don't care that much about setting labels on things anyway. Mercyful Fate and Venom made some really fascinating, exciting music back then. That's about where I am with it I guess.
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 11:14 am 
 

Gojira often gets mislabeled as death metal.
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Headless420
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 12:33 pm 
 

Venom isn't black metal.

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MetlaNZ
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 1:43 pm 
 

Headless420 wrote:
Venom isn't black metal.

Why? Feel free to elaborate.

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Tornado
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 2:46 pm 
 

Are Venom Black Metal? Yes and No! If you're comparing them to the second wave Black Metal bands, then no. But Venom came up with the name 'Black Metal' in 1982, a name that best described the music they played back then. 10 years later some teenage Norwegians claim to play Black Metal and then a lot of folk say that Venom can't possibly be Black Metal, because they sound nothing like the Black Metal being played a decade after Venom invented the term. If anything, someone should've told the Norwegian kids in the early 90's, "No, dudes, what you're playing isn't Black Metal, because it sounds nothing like Venom!". Lol

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Gravetemplar
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 2:51 pm 
 

Tornado wrote:
Are Venom Black Metal? Yes and No! If you're comparing them to the second wave Black Metal bands, then no. But Venom came up with the name 'Black Metal' in 1982, a name that best described the music they played back then. 10 years later some teenage Norwegians claim to play Black Metal and then a lot of folk say that Venom can't possibly be Black Metal, because they sound nothing like the Black Metal being played a decade after Venom invented the term. If anything, someone should've told the Norwegian kids in the early 90's, "No, dudes, what you're playing isn't Black Metal, because it sounds nothing like Venom!". Lol

Venom also didn't sound like any of the other first wave/proto black metal bands like Hellhammer, Bathory, Celtic Frost, etc. I agree though, we should call Venom and Motorhead "Black Metal" and Mayhem should be called something else. That would make things so much easier!

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LilTito
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 3:19 pm 
 

MetlaNZ wrote:
Headless420 wrote:
Venom isn't black metal.

Why? Feel free to elaborate.

Because they do not play black metal, simple as that.
I can call AC/DC death metal as much as i want but it wont change the fact that they actually play hard rock.
It doesn't matter if it was considered black metal at the time; Black Sabbath's Master of reality is still heavy/doom after 50 years.

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Empyreal
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 3:37 pm 
 

Venom definitely is not hard rock. That stuff was the beginning of much of the messy, chaotic black/thrash/etc types of bands now. Saying they're hard rock is much more inaccurate than saying black metal.
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Zelkiiro
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 3:44 pm 
 

Venom are heavy/speed metal, and that's that. They may have inspired black metal artists and coined the term, but they are not themselves black metal.
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Empyreal
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 3:47 pm 
 

That song "Buried Alive" off Black Metal doesn't sound like any other heavy metal track I've heard. Their general messiness and attitude was different too. That's all I'm saying - it's not like they were some random dime-a-dozen act is all.
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Kalaratri
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 4:00 pm 
 

I think calling Venom a speed metal band is pretty accurate, and one could also make the case that they were playing an early form of thrash (comparable to Kill 'Em All era Metallica) in the 1980s, but I wouldn't really consider them black metal in the way the term is used now. I would say that they're the ur-example of the blackened speed/thrash style that bands like Midnight and Hellripper are popularizing these days, but I think if we're talking about the band from the first wave with the most direct connection to the second wave that would have to be Bathory (and to a lesser extent Sarcofago and Celtic Frost).

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hells_unicorn
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 4:11 pm 
 

I remember going through a similar discussion to this with Noktorn way back in the day regarding whether or not Schizophrenia, Scream Bloody Gore, Leprosy, and even Slowly We Rot were simply thrash metal albums, primarily because he didn't really see much of a connection between them and the ultra-brutal stuff he was listening to at the time. He even struggled with viewing Cannibal Corpse's Eaten Back To Life as being a pure death metal album, that's how deep into the modern rabbit hole he was. I think there is a danger of viewing these bands with an anachronistic eye, and while Venom's Black Metal doesn't really function as a fully formed example of the sub-genre, I think there are enough elements already there between the production quality and the lyrical content to designate it as an early black/speed metal hybrid, which is basically what they are labeled as according to their MA page.
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des91
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 4:30 pm 
 

Yeah, I personally just consider Venom and Celtic Frost really dark, dirty and satanic Speed Metal. Same with Show No Mercy.

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Hexenmacht46290
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 17, 2021 11:02 pm 
 

HighwayCorsair wrote:
…I think that it's a little silly where people draw the line on "stoner doom" with stuff that sounds like Sabbath but isn't appropriate WEED LMAO enough…


Some people, who should know better, because they’re music reviewers, just don’t get that these are separate genres, doom, and stoner. Three of the most popular bands, Sleep, Electric Wizard, and High on Fire, can count as both(High on Fire is also sludge). Cephalic Carnage has a song about killing for weed, but that doesn’t make them stoner metal. The Sword takes after Sleep and High on Fire, but takes more after Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple, desert rock, and some NWOBHM, they aren’t really doom. Even when they were actually metal, they would never have made songs like “dying inside,” or “bewitched.”

Mercyful Fate definitely isn’t black metal, but they influenced some bands, and bands in other genres, like Candlemass. Venom doesn’t really count, although they could maybe count as thrash. At least, when making this mistake, one is actually giving credit to one of the most essential and influential bands, for black metal. I think it is kind of inaccurate to call Celtic Frost black metal. Death thrash, sure, and they were one of the first death metal bands to recognize that you could play slow, and get a different kind of heaviness, so of course, most death doom takes influence from them. They were a big influence on Darkthrone(Panzerfaust, along with their death metal era), and some other black metal bands, and plenty of other bands, in other genres, metal or otherwise.
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megadeth93
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 18, 2021 1:02 pm 
 

Empyreal wrote:
Venom definitely is not hard rock. That stuff was the beginning of much of the messy, chaotic black/thrash/etc types of bands now. Saying they're hard rock is much more inaccurate than saying black metal.


Venom are really English street-punk with satanic lyrics. If you listen to the first GBH album and the first Venom album back to back (go on, I've done it), you will be amazed at how similar they are musically and vocally.

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Radulfr
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 18, 2021 7:45 pm 
 

Empyreal wrote:
Venom definitely is not hard rock. That stuff was the beginning of much of the messy, chaotic black/thrash/etc types of bands now. Saying they're hard rock is much more inaccurate than saying black metal.

Where on this thread did ANYONE call them hard rock?

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MetlaNZ
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 18, 2021 10:31 pm 
 

LilTito wrote:
Because they do not play black metal, simple as that.
I can call AC/DC death metal as much as i want but it wont change the fact that they actually play hard rock.
It doesn't matter if it was considered black metal at the time; Black Sabbath's Master of reality is still heavy/doom after 50 years.

You've flipped my world upside down. I can't believe AC/DC aren't death metal?!

Venom, the black sheep of the black metal family, the dirty uncle that is actually the father that other members of the family don't want to acknowledge. Well the DNA results are in... Venom are the fathers of black, death and thrash metal.

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Empyreal
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 18, 2021 11:04 pm 
 

Radulfr wrote:
Empyreal wrote:
Venom definitely is not hard rock. That stuff was the beginning of much of the messy, chaotic black/thrash/etc types of bands now. Saying they're hard rock is much more inaccurate than saying black metal.

Where on this thread did ANYONE call them hard rock?


A few posts above me.

LilTito wrote:
I can call AC/DC death metal as much as i want but it wont change the fact that they actually play hard rock.
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DoomMetalAlchemist
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 18, 2021 11:06 pm 
 

Empyreal wrote:
Radulfr wrote:
Empyreal wrote:
Venom definitely is not hard rock. That stuff was the beginning of much of the messy, chaotic black/thrash/etc types of bands now. Saying they're hard rock is much more inaccurate than saying black metal.

Where on this thread did ANYONE call them hard rock?


A few posts above me.

LilTito wrote:
I can call AC/DC death metal as much as i want but it wont change the fact that they actually play hard rock.

He was calling AC/DC hard rock.

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Thexhumed
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 18, 2021 11:52 pm 
 

Children of Bodom. What do they even play?
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Oxenkiller
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 19, 2021 1:21 am 
 

^Exactly! Bodom could be classified as: Melodic death metal, Power metal with harsh vocals, traditional heavy metal with harsh vocals, shred/guitar hero metal, death metal, thrash metal... some of those categories fit better than others and many will just scoff at me for even trying to apply some of these to them. I dunno; I've always called them either melodic death metal or power metal with harsh vocals... and gotten flack for it.

But my point is, there gets to be a point where people get so obsessive about genres, and what genre classification goes with what bands that it gets borderline ridiculous- people spend hours on the internet bickering and flaming each other because of it. A lot of bands just sound like...what they sound like. I agree to an extent that having a genre label helps describe a band's music to someone who may not have heard it, or for review purposes or comparison purposes, but some of what we now consider separate genres, could really serve better as descriptions of a band's music rather than just an arbitrary box to put a group of bands together in.

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orphy
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 19, 2021 2:47 am 
 

I've never got Mercyful Fate being labeled as black metal. It just seems like people saw a guy in black and white makeup and made up their minds right then and there. It's heavy metal, through and through.
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joppek
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 19, 2021 3:12 am 
 

i hope at some point in the not-too-distant future "melodic death metal" will get replaced by a new term. like it's obvious that effigy of the forgotten is a more brutal take on death metal, hence "brutal death metal", but what gets called "melodic death metal" is very often a lot closer to iron maiden than cannibal corpse (not that there's anything wrong with that - this is not a gibe on the quality of anything, just categorization). of course there's also stuff that does sound like just a more melodic than usual take on death metal, like dismember or intestine baalism
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acid_bukkake
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 19, 2021 11:14 am 
 

hells_unicorn wrote:
From my end it seems that there is a lot of back and forth regarding certain bands in the melodic death camp that people want to just label as being "power metal with harsh vocals" (which is a real mouthful for a sub-genre label). I'll admit that Children Of Bodom and Kalmah have a lot of power metal elements to them that parallel some of the heavier bands from northern Europe, but the differences in songwriting and production style are a bridge too far for me to label bands like those as power metal with a unique vocal approach.

This is why that thread about calling these types of melodic death metal bands as "powerdeath" deserved more thought than just a smattering of "lol it's all melodeath." Considering we have labels for mixing death metal with other genres (deathrash, blackened death) or other styles of heavy music in general (deathcore, deathgrind), and there are clearly differences in how bands like CoB and Exmortus approach playing melodic death metal versus other acts/scenes (At the Gates, Dark Tranquility, etc.), then why not refer to a more distinct style of melodic death metal that borders on the "power metal with harsh vocals" descriptor as its own thing?

It's not saying it's an entirely new take, but it's giving a grander encompassing term for musical acts that share a more distinct approach to songwriting and playing than other contemporaries. Which is how (sub-)sub-genres become a thing anyway (see: funeral doom, slam, etc.).
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oldmetalhead
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 19, 2021 11:41 am 
 

What would Into Eternity be considered? Power/prog with death and black elements in the vocals?

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hells_unicorn
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 19, 2021 12:58 pm 
 

acid_bukkake wrote:
This is why that thread about calling these types of melodic death metal bands as "powerdeath" deserved more thought than just a smattering of "lol it's all melodeath." Considering we have labels for mixing death metal with other genres (deathrash, blackened death) or other styles of heavy music in general (deathcore, deathgrind), and there are clearly differences in how bands like CoB and Exmortus approach playing melodic death metal versus other acts/scenes (At the Gates, Dark Tranquility, etc.), then why not refer to a more distinct style of melodic death metal that borders on the "power metal with harsh vocals" descriptor as its own thing?

It's not saying it's an entirely new take, but it's giving a grander encompassing term for musical acts that share a more distinct approach to songwriting and playing than other contemporaries. Which is how (sub-)sub-genres become a thing anyway (see: funeral doom, slam, etc.).


I think the melodic death/power metal label for Children of Bodom and Kalmah works better than just saying "it's all melodeath", my intended dig was more so at people who take the opposite position, namely saying "it's all power metal" and lumping in every single melodeath album going back to Slaughter Of The Soul as such because of some similarities it shares with a couple token heavier power metal acts like Angel Dust and Falconer. If something is an actual verifiable hybrid that goes beyond a quirky individual stylistic niche, labeling it as a hybrid shouldn't be controversial.

oldmetalhead wrote:
What would Into Eternity be considered? Power/prog with death and black elements in the vocals?


The progressive/melodic death metal label they currently have on their MA page works best in my estimation, death metal vocals don't necessarily have to be low pitched and I struggle to find anything black metal in the riff work or atmosphere of any of their albums.
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oldmetalhead
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 19, 2021 1:10 pm 
 

oldmetalhead wrote:
What would Into Eternity be considered? Power/prog with death and black elements in the vocals?


hells_unicorn wrote:
The progressive/melodic death metal label they currently have on their MA page works best in my estimation, death metal vocals don't necessarily have to be low pitched and I struggle to find anything black metal in the riff work or atmosphere of any of their albums.

I tend to agree and there are no black metal riffs or atmospherics in their sound, just some vocal elements, especially with Stu who can do clean vocals, guttural and the shrieks - which i associate as a black metal thing.

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Yuli Ban
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 21, 2021 8:25 pm 
 

MetlaNZ wrote:
LilTito wrote:
Because they do not play black metal, simple as that.
I can call AC/DC death metal as much as i want but it wont change the fact that they actually play hard rock.
It doesn't matter if it was considered black metal at the time; Black Sabbath's Master of reality is still heavy/doom after 50 years.

You've flipped my world upside down. I can't believe AC/DC aren't death metal?!


AC/DC isn't, but it's well known that Judas Priest is a death metal band no matter how much they try to cover up this fact.


My contribution comes down to a genre specification: stoner rock and stoner metal aren't the same thing! To my ears, stoner rock sounds like an acidic sister of grunge rock. Fuzzy and riffy, but still relatively upbeat. Stoner metal is the one that's big, lumbering, and maximum over-fuzz, like an acidic version of sludge metal or noise rock. Yet even Wikipedia lists them as interchangeable terms.

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mirons
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 22, 2021 4:35 am 
 

hells_unicorn wrote:
I remember going through a similar discussion to this with Noktorn way back in the day regarding whether or not Schizophrenia, Scream Bloody Gore, Leprosy, and even Slowly We Rot were simply thrash metal albums, primarily because he didn't really see much of a connection between them and the ultra-brutal stuff he was listening to at the time. He even struggled with viewing Cannibal Corpse's Eaten Back To Life as being a pure death metal album, that's how deep into the modern rabbit hole he was. I think there is a danger of viewing these bands with an anachronistic eye, and while Venom's Black Metal doesn't really function as a fully formed example of the sub-genre, I think there are enough elements already there between the production quality and the lyrical content to designate it as an early black/speed metal hybrid, which is basically what they are labeled as according to their MA page.


I'd say he had a point. You don't need to look to modern/ultra brutal death metal to see that albums like Scream Bloody Gore, Slowly We Rot, and yes, also Eaten Back to life are still in the transition phase between thrash and death metal, still containing a lot of thrash metal riffage and aproach. Already by the early 90's death metal had established it's own sound, which, while clearly inluenced by thrash, didn't sound anything like it. That said, I disagree with Leprosy being included among those transitional albums; to me it is the very first (at least widely known) pure death metal album that had severed it's direct ties with thrash almost completely.

In line with the topic at hand, it's still open to debate what are the essential criteria of a musical genre. Are lyrical themes, image and attitude amongst those? If yes, I don't see why, say, Ghost couldn't be called black metal. Or why any heavier hardcore punk band isn't called thrash metal. I still think that lyrical themes, image, attitude, even production values are not essential to describe the genre, as many, if not most bands don't have the complete set of traits that tends to be common within any given genre. Otherwise all the current black metal bands that have clean, bass-heavy production, don't wear corpsepaint yet have diverse lyrical themes, are not black metal despite tremolo picked Darkthron-esque riffs, blast beats, and croaked vocals.

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LithoJazzoSphere
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 22, 2021 7:49 am 
 

Oxenkiller wrote:
But my point is, there gets to be a point where people get so obsessive about genres, and what genre classification goes with what bands that it gets borderline ridiculous- people spend hours on the internet bickering and flaming each other because of it. A lot of bands just sound like...what they sound like. I agree to an extent that having a genre label helps describe a band's music to someone who may not have heard it, or for review purposes or comparison purposes, but some of what we now consider separate genres, could really serve better as descriptions of a band's music rather than just an arbitrary box to put a group of bands together in.


For me it's just that the more time I spend in various subgenres, the more I hear distinctions between different approaches that bands take that they have in common with each other. And when I like a specific type of sound, I want to find other similar artists who also capture it. But when the subgenre itself is too broad, that makes it tricky, because there may be a dozen or more different takes on each style, and I want more of a particular one, but without a specific term to look for this often just involves randomly listening to band after band until I find what I like. And this in itself can be challenging because not every album or song from them may be characteristic of their other ones.

joppek wrote:
i hope at some point in the not-too-distant future "melodic death metal" will get replaced by a new term. like it's obvious that effigy of the forgotten is a more brutal take on death metal, hence "brutal death metal", but what gets called "melodic death metal" is very often a lot closer to iron maiden than cannibal corpse (not that there's anything wrong with that - this is not a gibe on the quality of anything, just categorization). of course there's also stuff that does sound like just a more melodic than usual take on death metal, like dismember or intestine baalism


I believe the issue here is what distinguishes pure "death" metal from other styles. On the surface to more casual listeners the key thing is the presence of growls, and those are easier to distinguish on some level. Sure, there are some vocalists who manage an inbetween sound that is pretty harsh but is still more or less pitched, but for the most part vocalists are or aren't. But when you get deeper into it, you realize that often the larger difference is in the riffing and sometimes the soloing. But even if you're knowledgeable about music theory, it gets really murky and granular to find songs that are 1% more melodic than another, and it's somewhat subjective. It doesn't help with the speeds the songs are often played at or the gear used and production techniques that obscure what is going on musically. No one has the time to transcribe and analyze every song they hear on a thorough level to ascribe its subgenre, so a lot of it is intuition that is developed over time and honed by reading the interpretations and discussions of others.

What complicates this is that if you study the history of melodic death metal, you'll find that it's a melting pot of influences, where the musicians are trying to take the primal aggression of the more fundamental death metal bands and marry those to the songcraft of traditional metal, power metal or what not. Every band approaches this slightly differently, and you get a continuum of bands from ones that are 5% more melodic than Autopsy to ones that sound virtually identical to the average power metal practitioner if you swapped vocal styles. But the melodicism of the purer DM bands tends to be more individual and less dividable into specific scenes, unlike MDM bands. Still, since the melodeath artists are blending the two traditions, you need a name that is somewhere in the middle. The approach has usually been to give an adjective to "death metal", but you could go in the other direction and call some bands "deadly power metal", "harsh heavy metal", or something along those lines.

acid_bukkake wrote:
hells_unicorn wrote:
From my end it seems that there is a lot of back and forth regarding certain bands in the melodic death camp that people want to just label as being "power metal with harsh vocals" (which is a real mouthful for a sub-genre label). I'll admit that Children Of Bodom and Kalmah have a lot of power metal elements to them that parallel some of the heavier bands from northern Europe, but the differences in songwriting and production style are a bridge too far for me to label bands like those as power metal with a unique vocal approach.

This is why that thread about calling these types of melodic death metal bands as "powerdeath" deserved more thought than just a smattering of "lol it's all melodeath." Considering we have labels for mixing death metal with other genres (deathrash, blackened death) or other styles of heavy music in general (deathcore, deathgrind), and there are clearly differences in how bands like CoB and Exmortus approach playing melodic death metal versus other acts/scenes (At the Gates, Dark Tranquility, etc.), then why not refer to a more distinct style of melodic death metal that borders on the "power metal with harsh vocals" descriptor as its own thing?

It's not saying it's an entirely new take, but it's giving a grander encompassing term for musical acts that share a more distinct approach to songwriting and playing than other contemporaries. Which is how (sub-)sub-genres become a thing anyway (see: funeral doom, slam, etc.).


The more I've thought about it the more I feel the solution is somewhere along those lines. That particular thread was just a bit of a trainwreck because of the OP's presentation style, but the idea itself I don't think is so far offbase.

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