HeavyKaribean

Hey everybody.
I'm making this topic in order to get some opinions about the future of the Heavy Metal. It has been a long time since I started listening to Heavy and Thrash Metal. Starting on Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Slayer (basically the classics) when i was a kid and going trough all the other bands like Kreator, Onslaught, Testament and even other types of Metal like Power Metal, Progressive, Doom etc.. Well I always had something new to listen. Until I had listen to basically everything from the old times. And now I get to a point where I can't find something that sounds really new and awesome. The last thing I really enjoyed was Machine Head "Unto the Locust" and even they seem to have adopted that kind of sound especially in the chorus that are easy to the ear. I don't know maybe I'm not looking well enough and there are a lot of good bands out there that I don't know. Or maybe the world is really lacking a good new and fresh wave of Heavy Metal.
What you think???

Cavalcade

I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at; are you trying to say that the music that kids these days listen doesn't have any soul, like it used to be back in the good ol' days?
There are plenty of bands still following in the well-traveled footsteps of the old school, if you're into that sort of thing. There are also plenty that are adding their own spin on things. If Machine Head is the most underground thing you've heard of so far, you're not trying hard enough.
If you like death metal, for example, have this neat new track by Gloria Morti: "Sleep Kill Regress Follow." That took me all of five seconds to bring up.
E: To get you started, follow metal blogs. Even though bloggers love to editorialize and do stupid shit, and metal blogs are no different, when they recommend something good, it's worth it.

HeavyKaribean

Nah I'm just saying that there is a lack of something fresh and new, like Thrash when it was first seen/listened..
And Machine Head is nothing underground. It is awesome. I said that the last thing I really enjoyed listening was their new album. And there is new bands that I like but most of them sound the same as the oldies. Like you following the footsteps but not really getting to something new.

technicolour

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crazysam23_Atax

If you think this, you haven't dug deep enough. There's always new sounds evolving. Hell, start listening to some newer Prog Metal, and you'll see what I mean immediately.

Edit:
Check this out.

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Terry Prachett is funnier than you! Discworld

Morphogenesis26

That's recent and it's badass and amazing.

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ChemicalFire

There are always going to certain hoops a band HAS to jump through in order to be "metal" it seems, which does make the genre a tad limiting. Metal fans are very specific.

One of the reasons I have very little interest in being in a "tr00" metal band

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Steve08

Not really, other than the trait of, like, "being relevant to true metal bands" which is basically asking that a hardcore band play hardcore. Would you not be confused if a band dressed like Possessed made hardcore music espousing nihilistic, harshly anti-modern sentiment, and did not have breakdowns? It's about recognizing the fact that some music does not actually resemble metal at a structural or artistic level, but rather that people often confuse anything with distortion as having some relation to metal music which is simply not there beyond aspects of timbre.

The innovators of death/black metal made use of fully motif-driven composition, not unlike classical music (but on a much smaller scale), which lends itself to being able to express any emotion easily if one merely resets the melodies within different intervals, the idea of that one must fulfill certain musical traits to be true is more just based on logic, and a rejection of egalitarian values which would have one believe that everyone can just pick up instruments and make good unimpeachable music and everything is OK, when in reality, all that contributes to is more and more mediocre, unimaginative music, which certainly isn't a good thing, at least in my book. I think formal education on music should be promoted, personally, in the same way that a student of English learns that there are objective grammatical rules, and then learns how to actually use those grammatical rules in context.

Basically, you have to bear some relevance to an acknowledged extreme metal subgenre and try to work within the confines of that subgenre to create a new, "progressive" take on that subgenre, because at this point, there is just too much music for new bands to keep trying to "out do" each other aesthetically, that's why "technical death metal" sucks, it's meant to fulfill bpm wars and little else, which is what youthful death metal bands already did in the early 90s when 200 bpm was really, really fast. A return to traditional, classical values of art and composition must absolutely be encouraged, otherwise the stagnation present in modern music will only grow more and more savage. Civilization requires discontents to renew it and that includes the innovators of death metal and black metal, and new bands must aid this by progressing the genre, not through copying the aesthetic of older bands (which is what people often seem to think I mean when I say, "new bands must look to the past" but that is misinterpretation), but by absorbing the underlying ideas that drives that music and applying it to their own, uniquely ambitious works.

That Ascariasis band combined all the worst parts of the different kinds of metalcore into some weird hybridization of current trends, ugh. The clearly djent-oriented, out of place chorus melody was the most ridiculous.

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ChemicalFire

That's all well and good Steve, we're all very aware of your great vast knowledge of motif driven death metal by now. You're also pretty much filling in the "if it's new it's not metal" response that I've come to expect from most metal heads on the internet, albeit in a more complex way. If metal really has to be in such a narrow range I'm glad that indepth into it beyond just enjoying the odd Black Metal and Death Metal band.

But that still doesn't stop the fact that anything that sounds truly, NEW in metal, is for the most part, shunned. I'd like to hear any release from any tr00 band in the last few years that sounds markabley different (I'm not talking subtly) different that the rest of it. You're acting as if all that was metal in the 90's is all that can be metal now and you're not the only one. When was the last time we had a new METAL subgenre instead of being pushed out into something else?

In the last few years in Hardcore for example, you've had HM2core style bands like NAILS and Trap Them becoming popular as well as the Wave which took a different perspective on most of the aspects of Hardcore. I can't think of any "new" to come out of metal in the last few years that hasn't instantly been dismissed as "not metal" apart from Ishan's solo material.

Also as a student of English at Univeristy, the fact that there ARE objective rules means nothing. You can break them for the sake of artistic and poetic merit, hell even spelling things properly is optional if it's for a purpose. It's one of the first things you learn.

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Steve08

If this were actually the case, there would not be new Metal bands, and yet, there are-- just not many good ones.You are reacting to my words without actually understanding what they mean, to the point where I even said that motivically driven writing "lends itself to being able to express any emotion easily if one merely resets the melodies within different intervals". That writing process does not extend only to Metal, it also fully drives all Classical music, select few electronic artists, and a large amount of vintage Progressive Rock bands. There, you have four genres which on the surface, are all totally different, yet beneath that surface, all resonate with the immortal spirit of music which is written to express something epic and dramatic, beyond the mundanity of every day life, greater than the individual.Why is an arbitrary, wild variance in sound a good thing? Metal bands which are new and distinct are not shunned, so long as they still play, uh, metal. Here you are projecting your own views onto what constitutes "new", which is clearly more oriented around the idea that if a band is aesthetically unfamiliar, it's "new". When you acknowledge that an object exists, do you also believe that that object has certain traits which it fulfills in its existence, no matter what circumstance that existence is within?You do not keep up to date with the underground scene, so you obviously are not familiar with it.As long as you break them in a way that is not arbitrary and ******ed, such as in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian which is curiously devoid of much punctuation, yes, otherwise you are essentially being "artistic" for the sake of it, which basically defines hipsterdom to a T: being a caricature of something else. Why do something for literally no reason? I don't think placing logic upon reality is a bad thing.

However, this is still a fair point. I'm not obsessed with music being written in a key, though, otherwise I wouldn't listen to Metal, which is written from a purely chromatic standpoint. I'm more concerned with, like, how the sentences (individual phrases, not "parts") compliment each other.

I'm also off to school myself now, so I will have to truncate my participation in this discussion for the moment.

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Nietsche

'True metal' is just so limited maaaannnnn, I mean, between Queensrÿche, Bolt Thrower and Cathedral it's like there's no room for maneuver or experimentation. Silly genre elitists.

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Steve08

Cathedral is just a Burzum ripoff, clearly you're not kvlt enough to grasp this, bro

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Nietsche

Yeah well get this. Iron Maiden are famous for using harmony guitars right? What other bands use harmony guitars? Metalcore bands. Clearly, Iron Maiden were just ripping off the In Flames ripoffs.

WHERE IS YOUR TRUE METAL NOW?!?!?!

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ChemicalFire

Wild variance is good because stagnation is a bad thing, it's tedious. Which is what metal seems to tend towards.

And if I'm projecting, then so are you, where in the "great bible of metal" does it say that "And He looked upon his Blast Beats and motif driven death metal, and he saw it was good"? Treating music as an object just doesn't sit with me. It is not a THING it is a concept, a collection of sounds that only have rules because we as human beings, have given those sounds rules. There is nothing scientifically right about either of our views, I just find yours tends towards limiting what bits of squiggly air I'm allowed to call metal or not.

And let me just test your theory. If a band sounded like BMTH, yet had motif driven writing based around a narrative and inner dark emotion and death. Would you class it as metal, or would you take one listen to it and claim it was "not metal" and was crap?



Then show me some new and interesting metal... and explain WHY it is new and interesting as I'll readily admit my knowledge of Death Metal is not as thorough as you.

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Nietsche

I'll call that collection of paper with writing on a spatula goddammit, and ain't no metalheads gonna stop me.



Do I even need to explain why this is funny.

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HeavyKaribean

Well I guess hoping for simple answers to simple questions is out of the equation.
I just want to know if you have found a nowadays band that you can say "This shit sounds fresh and new and they can really go somewhere". And when I say go somewhere I mean reaching a level like Big 4, Iron Maiden and stuff like that. Or if you think that is impossible to a band from nowadays in Heavy Metal to reach such iconic levels like this ones that everybody knows about.

And finally, I think some of you are just trying to sound clever and provided of amazing knowledge but you are just talking shit that no one cares about and are of no use.

ChemicalFire

It wouldn't happen and I know it. It was a hypothetical exercise based around Steve's ideas on what is and is not allowed in Metal.



And my point was not that all metal sounds the same, it's that there seems to be a contrivance around what is and is not allowed for something to be metal and all we have now in terms of subgenre or styles is all we'll ever have.

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technicolour

there's plenty of new "true" metal bands...

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Morphogenesis26

Queensryche suck.

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