2007 Album Stats and Analysis (Awesome stuff inside)

[Magius]

Which just goes to show that there are many more variants of Death Metal than Power Metal. Simply using growls for vocals combined with any genre makes a band Genre/Death Metal. Gothic Death, Progressive Death, Doom Death, Symphonic Death, Blackened Death, even Ambiance Death, to name but a few.

I don't know of anyone who wouldn't call Into Eternity Death Metal. There was no doubt that there was a flat out Death Metal band on stage when Mercenary played PPUSA IV. However, it is true their last two releases have dropped a lot of the growls to be sure. I'm positive Raintime was a Death Metal band I watched open PPUSA VIII. To say there has never been a Death Metal band on the roster is as wrong a statement as can be made.

While it may be true that these bands use both clean and extreme vox, you may have noticed that the same singer was doing both. One can only assume then that those growlers also have what you declare to be talent. One might also extrapolate that since the explosion of the Gothenburg / Melodic death Metal movement, that there are a lot of dual style singers, and therefore a lot of Death Metal bands with talented singers. Surely you wouldn't argue that a large part of the increased number of Death Metal bands isn't because of the Gothenburg (style) explosion? You may even be surprised to like more death Metal than you think. I realize that a lot of people don't like something, until Glenn puts it on the roster. Then they can find a reason to justify listening to and liking it. Too weird.

It wouldn't be far fetched for Glenn to put a band like Hypocrisy, Wintersun, Scar Symmetry, or Ensiferum on the roster. They're no more odd ball than Raintime, or the first Mercenary performance. Will you like those bands then?

There's another reason that Death out numbers Power being overlooked I think. It's a reason that's probably not going to find a lot of popularity on this forum. For many of today's younger tr00 Metalheads if it isn't Death or Black then it's just poser metal. Power Metal is the cheese of the Metal World, and reminiscent of the 80's, not to be taken seriously. That's not entirely true of course, and one can argue that slaying dragons is no more or less cheesy than snarling through face paint. Nevertheless, it is a perception for some.

Progressive Metal is just too wimpy for a lot of these same fans. Roy Kahn crooning about rolling a fire just isn't going to do much for the more rabid metalhead. Death in that fire is more their style.

The fact is that when you factor in the Gothenburg explosion, and the fact that a lot of the newer generation of Metal fans simply LIKE extreme vocals better, the end result is a greater growth of Death over Power metal.

 

[Cheiron]

Magius, we agree!

 

[skyrefuge]

IMO, the required vocal abilities to make prog/power metal versus death metal are different

Ah, whoops. When I said "it's not a matter of ability", that was simply in reference to your statement "...which no death vocal defender has been *able* to answer"; I was referring to *my* ability to answer a question, not the abilities of vocalists. Anyway, it was just supposed to be a little joke, but it probably came off a bit too snarky (given how much you've now written about the issue of going off-topic!)

I shared my opinions on why I believe there are more death metal releases than power metal releases, namely the two vocal styles require different abilities (which I tried to quantify and compare with physically measurable talents like octave range, singing in key). You like numbers and measurements Neil, and I was just trying to support my opinion with something measurable, whether anyone agrees with my opinion or not.

Oh, no, I actually agree with this. I believe there are simply fewer people who can sing cleanly in a way that doesn't sound "bad" than there are people who can growl in a way that doesn't sound "bad". So that's bound to be a factor when deciding what kind of vocals your band will have (of course, it's far from the only factor). However, I disagree with your method for quantifying that difference. You were asking about quantitative differences *within* the group of growlers. That doesn't have anything to do with your hypothesis, which relies on the relationship *between* clean singers to growlers. To support your hypothesis, you would need to gather some kind of data on the number of growling bands who wanted a clean singer but couldn't find one, or something like that.

Do I consider Metal Archives the sole authority on all things metal? No.

Neither do I. However, the data this thread is based on came from Metal Archives. The number of "death" vs. "power" bands that you're discussing here are the numbers that Metal Archives reports. So it only makes sense to use their categories when continuing the discussion. The point is that the Metal Archives's limits on the "death" category are a lot broader than yours, and thus, if *you* were to categorize all the bands yourself, the "death" vs. "power" numbers would be closer to each other than Metal Archives's numbers.

Neil

 

[eaeolian]

I don't know of anyone who wouldn't call Into Eternity Death Metal. There was no doubt that there was a flat out Death Metal band on stage when Mercenary played PPUSA IV.

Really? I could completely argue that point. There was a metal band that had a growling vocalist on stage. Compositionally, their songs aren't what most fans of death metal would recognize as being in that style.

Into Eternity does use death metal composition structures - among many others - but they're definitely not what I would think of as a death metal band.

There's more to music than vocals.

 

[rms]

Raintime death metal? Damn man you need to listen to some death metal bands rofl

 

[Dolamite S. Biffle]

THIS THREAD IS RIDICULOUS!

Everyone clearly should just do whisper remixes of all their old tracks. Just imagine the power behind tracks like "Firesoul" by Mercenary only whispered, oh yeah.

 

[...AndTimeBegan]

Mercenary, Orphaned Land, Into Eternity, and Therion utilize a clean vocal style as much or more than the death vocal style. There is no right or wrong to your opinion that they can be labeled as progressive death - that's your opinion. Would any of those bands pigeonhole themselves by labeling their music as only progressive death metal? I doubt it.

Given that the overwhelming majority of the vocals in After Forever and Epica are sung by classically trained vocalists, you're going to have a hard time convincing Floor and Simone that they are a variation of death metal or have their roots in death metal. Both bands utilize some growly voices sparingly when compared to the amount of clean and angelic voices, but certainly not enough to say that either band is more death metal than not.

I'm done talking to you. Put down your metal CDs... better yet just stop listening to music. You have no idea what you're talking about, you've been proven wrong a hundred times, and you've even been proven to be illiterate. Just stop.

 

[...AndTimeBegan]

Which just goes to show that there are many more variants of Death Metal than Power Metal. Simply using growls for vocals combined with any genre makes a band Genre/Death Metal. Gothic Death, Progressive Death, Doom Death, Symphonic Death, Blackened Death, even Ambiance Death, to name but a few.

I don't know of anyone who wouldn't call Into Eternity Death Metal. There was no doubt that there was a flat out Death Metal band on stage when Mercenary played PPUSA IV. However, it is true their last two releases have dropped a lot of the growls to be sure. I'm positive Raintime was a Death Metal band I watched open PPUSA VIII. To say there has never been a Death Metal band on the roster is as wrong a statement as can be made.

While it may be true that these bands use both clean and extreme vox, you may have noticed that the same singer was doing both. One can only assume then that those growlers also have what you declare to be talent. One might also extrapolate that since the explosion of the Gothenburg / Melodic death Metal movement, that there are a lot of dual style singers, and therefore a lot of Death Metal bands with talented singers. Surely you wouldn't argue that a large part of the increased number of Death Metal bands isn't because of the Gothenburg (style) explosion? You may even be surprised to like more death Metal than you think. I realize that a lot of people don't like something, until Glenn puts it on the roster. Then they can find a reason to justify listening to and liking it. Too weird.

It wouldn't be far fetched for Glenn to put a band like Hypocrisy, Wintersun, Scar Symmetry, or Ensiferum on the roster. They're no more odd ball than Raintime, or the first Mercenary performance. Will you like those bands then?

There's another reason that Death out numbers Power being overlooked I think. It's a reason that's probably not going to find a lot of popularity on this forum. For many of today's younger tr00 Metalheads if it isn't Death or Black then it's just poser metal. Power Metal is the cheese of the Metal World, and reminiscent of the 80's, not to be taken seriously. That's not entirely true of course, and one can argue that slaying dragons is no more or less cheesy than snarling through face paint. Nevertheless, it is a perception for some.

Progressive Metal is just too wimpy for a lot of these same fans. Roy Kahn crooning about rolling a fire just isn't going to do much for the more rabid metalhead. Death in that fire is more their style.

The fact is that when you factor in the Gothenburg explosion, and the fact that a lot of the newer generation of Metal fans simply LIKE extreme vocals better, the end result is a greater growth of Death over Power metal.

Thank you.

Fiddler, if you don't consider Into Eternity, Raintime, Mercenary etc to be progressive death, then stop there and say Athiest, Death (later), and Cynic aren't progressive death either. Once again you are wrong, as usual.

 

[skyrefuge]

Raintime death metal? Damn man you need to listen to some death metal bands rofl

A lot of it is really just a naming issue. Metal classification is in a lot of ways just as silly as racial classification. At least in American society, one drop of sub-Saharan African blood in your lineage is enough to make you 'Black', just as one component of your sound (the vocal) is enough to make you 'death metal'. But that's how it is, and it's no use trying to reclassify the whole genre, so you just have to go with it if you want to be understood. You really need to know the context and background of the speaker to know what *type* of death metal someone is talking about when they say 'death metal' with no further qualifications.

As far as Metal Archives goes, even if you simply were a death metal band in the past, but have now changed to something else, you'll still come up under a 'death metal' search (which I think is the correct operation, but it helps if people are aware of that fact when we're discussing this).

Neil

 

[Burnout]

I would characterize Raintime as power metal (albeit with harsh vocals), Mercenary as melodic death and Orphaned Land along with Into Eternity as progressive metal. When I think of progressive death metal as a genre I'd be more inclined to identify bands like Gojira, Augury, Lykathea Aflame and such. Death, Cynic, Atheist, Quo Vadis, Anata et al would be technical death metal. I've always considered Epica/After Forever to be gothic metal.

All that said, I don't think genre tags are terribly significant. If you like it, listen to it. Who cares what it's categorized as? And if you feel inclined to apply labels, harsh vocals are not the only characteristic I would look at in determining if a band belongs to the death metal genre.

 

[Magius]

Thanks to Glenn for taking a chance on a Progressive Death Metal band!

That's from the band themselves, on stage, to 1200 people. They put themselves in the Metal / Death Metal / Progressive catagory on MySpace. You can call them what you want.

It's always interesting to see how Metal descriptions evolve, and history gets rewritten. What was Metal in 1977 was never Metal in 2007. Charcateristics that defined genres no longer apply. New genres are created just to pigeonhole one band.

Obviously there is more to music, but what makes Heed Power Metal and Hypocrisy Gothenburg Death Metal if not the distinction of the style of Vocals used? If Division fired Nick and hired a growler, what kind of music would you be playing then? As ...AndTimeBegan pointed out there are lots of Death Metal sub-genres.

I'm not going to debate genres as half of them are ridiculous anyway. I am, however, going to stand by my post.

 

[Burnout]

That's from the band themselves, on stage, to 1200 people. They put themselves in the Metal / Death Metal / Progressive catagory on MySpace. You can call them what you want.

It's always interesting to see how Metal descriptions evolve, and history gets rewritten. What was Metal in 1977 was never Metal in 2007. Charcateristics that defined genres no longer apply. New genres are created just to pigeonhole one band.

Obviously there is more to music, but what makes Heed Power Metal and Hypocrisy Gothenburg Death Metal if not the distinction of the style of Vocals used? If Division fired Nick and hired a growler, what kind of music would you be playing then? As ...AndTimeBegan pointed out there are lots of Death Metal sub-genres.

I'm not going to debate genres as half of them are ridiculous anyway. I am, however, going to stand by my post.

I really don't feel like arguing the point, but ignoring the instrumentation/instrumental aspect of a band and making a genre determination purely based on the vocal style seems a bit shortsighted to me.

Into Eternity may consider themselves a progressive death band and while there are some clear influences, I wouldn't label them that way. The Scattering of Ashes was very far removed from most death metal I've heard. I've heard Mikael Akerfeldt refer to Opeth as a death metal band, but I really wouldn't characterize them that way.

 

[eaeolian]

Obviously there is more to music, but what makes Heed Power Metal and Hypocrisy Gothenburg Death Metal if not the distinction of the style of Vocals used? If Division fired Nick and hired a growler, what kind of music would you be playing then? As ...AndTimeBegan pointed out there are lots of Death Metal sub-genres.

I could argue it, as well, but let's be real here - it's not like Morbid Angel or Hypocrisy played at PPUSA, or would. For Pete's sake, I asked Tim what kind of band IE was and he said "I dunno - a metal band?"

If we fired Nick and hired a growler, three things would happen: 1.) We'd be an American Power Metal Band - Now With Growled Vocals! 2.) our liquor bill would go WAY down, and 3.) someone would trash us in a review for not hiring a vocalist that sounded like the old one.

My comment is simply meant to underline the fact that growled vox != death metal. Growled/harsh vocals are a part of the metal "grab bag" now, and a band using them does NOT make that band a "death metal band".