25 Most Important METAL bands

That's dumb. You have like about twenty bands to represent thrash, death, and black or whatever, but only one band to represent power and one band to represent prog. If you as big on power metal as you are on extreme metal bands, you'd probably have Blind Guardian, Iced Earth, Manowar, Running Wild, etc. all on there.
 
What can I say? I think extreme metal is much more interesting and mature musically, and it deserves to be recognized as such. Extreme metal is the full expression of what metal had been moving towards from Black Sabbath until the mid-'90s. The bands selected pushed the limits of metal and turned it into what it is today. Would metal be the slightest bit different today if Iced Earth or Running Wild didn't exist? Barely. Bands that are simply good at what they do are not what belong on this list.


Honestly though, are prog metal bands doing anything that Rush and other prog rock bands didn't do earlier, besides just making the guitars heavier?
 
MasterOLightning said:
What can I say? I think extreme metal is much more interesting and mature musically, and it deserves to be recognized as such. Extreme metal is the full expression of what metal had been moving towards from Black Sabbath until the mid-'90s. The bands selected pushed the limits of metal and turned it into what it is today. Would metal be the slightest bit different today if Iced Earth or Running Wild didn't exist? Barely. Bands that are simply good at what they do are not what belong on this list.


Honestly though, are prog metal bands doing anything that Rush and other prog rock bands didn't do earlier, besides just making the guitars heavier?

It's fine that extreme metal is your favorite genre, but not to everybody extreme metal is what metal is supposed to be (ok, so I get what you're saying about extreme metal being the full expression of Sabbath, but I'm not going to try to say that any power metal band is as influencial as Slayer or Venom, for example). I prefer power metal over most extreme metal. I find to be more fun and is more of an escape from reality, and not to mention more listenable, not to say I don't like some extreme metal. Iced Earth and Running Wild aren't the founders of power metal, so power metal would still exist without them, though they have had significant influence on power metal. But metal wouldn't be the same without Helloween and Blind Guardian because power metal is like an evolution of traditional heavy metal style like Maiden, Priest, and Dio. I'm not trying to say power metal is more important than thrash, death, and extreme metal, but it deserves equal representation as each of those genres probably besides thrash (Isn't death metal like an evolution of thrash metal?)

And some people consider Rush to be the innovators of prog metal as Sabbath are the innovators of metal. Sabbath's early albums weren't much heavier.
 
MasterOLightning said:
What can I say? I think extreme metal is much more interesting and mature musically, and it deserves to be recognized as such. Extreme metal is the full expression of what metal had been moving towards from Black Sabbath until the mid-'90s. The bands selected pushed the limits of metal and turned it into what it is today. Would metal be the slightest bit different today if Iced Earth or Running Wild didn't exist? Barely. Bands that are simply good at what they do are not what belong on this list.


Honestly though, are prog metal bands doing anything that Rush and other prog rock bands didn't do earlier, besides just making the guitars heavier?

I don't want to start an argument...but in your post you seem to invalidate, in passing, your own reasoning as to why Carcass makes the list over Napalm Death. Ok, I'll stop harping on the Napalm Death thing now. It's really not important...and btw, it's not that I don't like Carcass. I love Carcass. :headbang:
 
^By today's standards, no... but back in the day Zeppelin was regarded as being pretty darn heavy.

Personally I think In Flames influenced the Melo-Death genre more than At The Gates. The riffs on lunar strain sound more like todays cliche melo-death riffs than anything ATG was doing early in their career.
 
What the hell... melo-death? Neo classical/shred metal is more innovative than melo-death. Put Yngwie on there instead. :lol:

The Led Zeppelin thing is a good point. It gets questionable whether or not Sabbath should be considered metal if Zeppelin and especially Purple are not to be considered metal. I'd consider Purple as metal because In Rock and Machine Head are equally as metal and almost equally as influencial as Sabbath's first three albums. But if you don't want to rewrite history, then the historically correct thing to do would be to consider Zeppelin as metal. Personally, I would never consider Zeppelin as metal, but metal did belong to them first, then Maiden, Priest, etc. Their can't be a new wave of British heavy metal without an old wave British heavy metal.

Anyways, I'm not trying to start an internet argument either. I've spent so much time discussing this kind of stuff that I had to step in.
 
I think it would be pretty silly to ignore melo-death as being a big part of metal's history. It blew up at one time and brought a lot of new people into metal, and its gone to influence a ton of bands (although most are pretty bad these days). Hell In Flames was the first underground (when they actually were underground) band I really got into... I wouldn't be here without them :)
 
I don't see Disembowelment or Evoken being as important as Cathedral (almost single handedly reviving the 2nd wave of Doom in the early 90's), or one of Paradise Lost, Anathema or My Dying Bride. (My vote would be for Paradise Lost).

Also no Pentagram, which I would have thought would have been a no brainer for a top 25 list. Much as I love Candlemass, I don't think they are more important than Cathedral in terms of influence.

Is there really a need for a Death AND a Possessed entry?

Is there really a need for Suffocation AND Morbid Angel?

Just wondering, not meant as criticism.
 
Opeth important? Pff... They're nothing but late-comers to the melodeath scene, and happened to make a couple of ballads, which happened to make them popular. They've contributed nothing to the metal scene that warrants them a spot on that list.