I was wondering why blues seems to be a genre totally skipped over by just about every metal band. Is it because Led Zeppelin did it too well in Physical Graffiti- IV? Anyone know of any decent metal bands with a blues influence?
Blues Metal? I can't find it
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blakmetalemp
Armed to the teeeettthhh!
RETIREDTrapped
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Misanthrope
Latin, NOT Mexican.
Manbient
Queer Old Man
I don't really think there is a style... because if you look at the evolution of that kind of music it went Blues>Rock>Metal... so anything that could be considered bues metal is... just rock. At least that's the way i see it. I can't really think of any clean cut examples of blues metal anyway... can you? and if there is... it is more like rock. I would say a bunch of Nu Metal comes kinda close to Blues Metal then... the groove stuff i mean... i dunno. I'm still sticking to the idea there isn't really such a thing because it would just be rock music.
Prometheus
Member
I agree, while it's not a style, there are some blues-influenced metal bands...
I think particularly of some of the southern rock/metal bands, sludgy bands, stuff like COC, Down, and some Soilent Green. Other bands such as Clutch, have always seemed to have a bluesy kinda feel to them...
But thats just me...
I think particularly of some of the southern rock/metal bands, sludgy bands, stuff like COC, Down, and some Soilent Green. Other bands such as Clutch, have always seemed to have a bluesy kinda feel to them...
But thats just me...
Russell
__
yes, down is a very blues oriented band... its groove metal.... lamb of god is pretty bluesy too.....
Yes, ZEPPELIN are (were) the almighty masters of "blues metal" (and rock, for that matter), but there have been, over the years, blues-based bands that are either full-on metal or have incorporated metal influences, although not too many.
As others have mentioned, AC/DC, especially EARLY, Bon Scott era AC/DC, were blues based. The albums "High VOltage" through "Highway to Hell" (and 'Back in Black' so a small degree) are clearly blues-inspired metal.
In 1989, a "supergroup" of sorts named Badlands released one of the best albums EVER, I feel. It was simply 'self titled' & is an exhibtion in how blues & metal can work seemlessly together. The album was the best since Zep!!
The band consisted of Jake E Lee (of Ozzy fame), Eric Singer on drums (who went on to play with cheese-meisters/clowns, Kiss), Greg Chaisson on bass (unknown?) and the GREAT blues/rock vocalist Ray Gillen, who had a short stint in Black Sabbath (no releases of theirs, however, feature his talents).
Seriously, this album is FRIGGIN' incredible. Buy it. If you can find it!!!!
Of course, Deep Purple touched on the blues in the early 70s, as did hard rockers (although not metal) Bad COmpany.
Of course, one of rock's best 'heavy blues' album was created by the Jeff Beck Group in '68! Featuring a young Rod Stewart (!) on vocals - BEFORE he wussed out - the album is a showcase in the style that both Beck & Clapton were inventing, along with Jimmy Page of Led Zep. The album features the CLASSIC heavy-rock instrumental, "Beck's Bolero".
I highly recommend this record!!!
And Rainbow - the Mark I edition - with Dio, Bain, Richie Blackmore, etc. - were clearly blues-based metal. And they were metal, for sure.
Seek out any of their three studio records "Blackmore's Rainbow", "Rising" & "Long Live Rock n Roll", and their GREAT all-blues live album "On Stage".
As others have mentioned, AC/DC, especially EARLY, Bon Scott era AC/DC, were blues based. The albums "High VOltage" through "Highway to Hell" (and 'Back in Black' so a small degree) are clearly blues-inspired metal.
In 1989, a "supergroup" of sorts named Badlands released one of the best albums EVER, I feel. It was simply 'self titled' & is an exhibtion in how blues & metal can work seemlessly together. The album was the best since Zep!!
The band consisted of Jake E Lee (of Ozzy fame), Eric Singer on drums (who went on to play with cheese-meisters/clowns, Kiss), Greg Chaisson on bass (unknown?) and the GREAT blues/rock vocalist Ray Gillen, who had a short stint in Black Sabbath (no releases of theirs, however, feature his talents).
Seriously, this album is FRIGGIN' incredible. Buy it. If you can find it!!!!
Of course, Deep Purple touched on the blues in the early 70s, as did hard rockers (although not metal) Bad COmpany.
Of course, one of rock's best 'heavy blues' album was created by the Jeff Beck Group in '68! Featuring a young Rod Stewart (!) on vocals - BEFORE he wussed out - the album is a showcase in the style that both Beck & Clapton were inventing, along with Jimmy Page of Led Zep. The album features the CLASSIC heavy-rock instrumental, "Beck's Bolero".
I highly recommend this record!!!
And Rainbow - the Mark I edition - with Dio, Bain, Richie Blackmore, etc. - were clearly blues-based metal. And they were metal, for sure.
Seek out any of their three studio records "Blackmore's Rainbow", "Rising" & "Long Live Rock n Roll", and their GREAT all-blues live album "On Stage".
Thank You Soundmaster- I saw a while ago that they rereleased Badlands, I will buy it. I didnt know early Rainbow was blues based, and I love early Deep Purple, and yes i still enjoy early Ac Dc as well.
So is this Jeff Beck group named just that?
It is strange that so few metal bands have not taken up a blues influenced style, as hell, Led Zeppelin Ac Dc and Deep Purple are pretty much the biggest selling bands in rock history.
I always wanted to hear a metal band behind Stevie Ray Vaughn, maybe some other virtuoso blues guitarist will decide to try mixing metal with blues one day.
So is this Jeff Beck group named just that?
It is strange that so few metal bands have not taken up a blues influenced style, as hell, Led Zeppelin Ac Dc and Deep Purple are pretty much the biggest selling bands in rock history.
I always wanted to hear a metal band behind Stevie Ray Vaughn, maybe some other virtuoso blues guitarist will decide to try mixing metal with blues one day.
Brooks
Eyes Wide Open
DrX
Get off my lawn
Kushantaiidan
SPASIBA AX.
Yes. They simply named themselves "Jeff Beck Group".
The album, "Truth", predated the recording of Led Zep I by a few months. It has a version of "You Shook Me" which Jimmy Page heard & loved so much that he decided Zep MUST cover it & release it!
Rainbow wasn't as bluesy as these other bands are, but the influence still shows.
Their live album "On Stage" is practically ALL blues.
Herald of Abomination
NOT PANCAKES
The History of Metal Music 1969 - 1983
Metal began in prototype form with Black Sabbath, the blues band that shifted into heavy gothic industrial rock to express the massive dread of modern life they expounded upon through many metaphors. Their trademark occultism symbolized life in terms of the eternal and ideal, while their gritty, sensual, lawless guitar gave significance to the immediate and real. The resulting fusion of the bohemian generation with a nihilistic, dark and morbid streak birthed early metal. Those who had rejected the hippies and found no solace in social order embraced this music and lost bohemians everywhere began to find new directions in this sound.
Its influences were many: the grainy howl of primitive blues, the majestic sound shaping of classical works, and the rising anti-rock/heavy rock culture. Bands such as King Crimson/Robert Fripp, Blue Cheer, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Link Wray, MC5, Dick Dale, Cream, The Who and Jimi Hendrix all contributed to a need for a more textural but more abstract sound in intense rock. When Black Sabbath stepped out of their rock training to write the first arguably metal, as distinct from other forms of popular music, songs, they spawned a genre which would despite a loss of its influential technique to other styles continue mutating for three decades at the time of this writing. (A great deal of influence also came from Roma guitar player Django Reinhardt, who like Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi was limited in motion to only two fingers on his fretboard hand.)
Having been thus born of the blues tradition early metal remained much within that framework, with a dual tradition existing in Black Sabbath, the proto-metal architecturalists, and Led Zeppelin, the blues-rock extravagantists who stayed within the boundaries of the rock/blues tradition. Through 1970s as the British metal bands continued to rule and even through the rise of the American speed metal bands, metal remained despite its ferocity and pummeling use of muted-strumming technique essentially more extreme creations of the original ideal, an independent journeyman blues lament to chronicle a wanderlife, updated with the nihilistic speed of industrial hardcore rock.
While the 1970s struggled to develop further the innovations in rock between 1965-1969 the influences that hit metal were the most intense bands at the time: the ecclectic but intense progressive rock emerging from Europe. In adopted styles of American bands, these musicians used classical theory to give narrative context to themes which in the popular music style, repeat through cycling short complementary phrases or riffs before going to chorus or bridging to pre-resolution. Their technique, bringing exactness to jazz and classical styles not yet fully adapted from acoustic guitar, stood in opposition to the looser jams of Led Zeppelin in that it espoused structure over improvisation and was often played in near replica of the album recording.
As metal grew in the middle 1970s, its fragmented nature brought it both commercial success and hilarity as a retarded younger brother to rock. The blues side merged with late model progressive rock and became stadium metal, which brought metal to its highest popularity ever but degraded the authentic nature of the material as its focus dissolved into hedonism, technicality and showmanship. While acts like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Motorhead represented metal as a public innovation, the more obscure and threatening NWOBHM bands arose with the subgenre in the 1970s to oppose commercial slickness with direct and primal music. Angel Witch and Diamond Head and eventually Venom tore technique to its basics to get to the ballad-meets-firefight balance of rebel music.
When hardcore punk grew out of nowhere to become the most radiant overturning of values in popular culture, metal faded in the public eye as its excess failed to bring corresponding extremities and, as was found in extreme hardcore music, dissident ideologies which were more pragmatic than whining antipathy or indulgence. Anarchy, anti-authoritarianism, nihilism and alienation came pouring through this music and with it came an ideology of dissidence and independent action. The Exploited, Discharge and the Misfits stunned the world awake to artistic withdrawl and post-social thinking. Metal converged for the attack. (Hardcore was a subset of punk, which between roughly 1965 and 1974 was simple 1950s rock played by garage bands before the genre solidified in aesthetic as opposition music, producing an underground ultra-minimalist version which removed the "rock" from punk to make finely nihilistic music. Tracking the origin of this genre is difficult, as for many it is rock played with power chords to a basic tempo, but Mötorhead, The Ramones and The Stooges deserve mention.)
The initial lunge of proto-post-"heavy metal" metal, via thrash and speed metal arising simultaneously in hybrid form of metal/hardcore, seemed at the time and remains abruptly adolescent yet resoundingly honest. Its unresolved questions and finite tolerance for the dualism of social and personal truth gave this movement inertia even into the commercial realm, which was for the most part unexplored until Metallica gave the go-ahead with 1992's "Metallica." At its inception a genre of palm-muted, Morse-codish riffs and epic song structures the speed metal of the 1980s held out until the 1990s before being absorbed into groove-addicted Pantera or Prong clones, open melody bouncing hard rock like Metallica, or the same indulgent, ornate, inconclusive self-gratification that bore metal into avalanche under its own weight in the 1970s.
The tendency in speed metal to use progressive stylings and structures within savagery, and ethic of finding more in life than rejection (many metalheads of the day saw punk as fatalistic and ineffective, while punks would call metalheads elitists) and gory more than political imagery merged with the fast and elemental riffing of thrash bands to set the stage for a new style to emerge. In 1984, metal would begin another branching process: fast bands like Slayer, percussive bands like Exodus, grinding bands like Possessed and bizarre poetic and minimalist offerings diversely spread between Sodom, Nuclear Assault, Bathory and Celtic Frost. This gave rise in the mid-1980s to a condition where aboveground bands like Megadeth or Testament played to large crowds as death/speed metal hybrids like Destruction, Kreator and Rigor Mortis laid the groundwork for the renaissance of death metal. These genres in turn would fulfill the promise of thrash and separate metal from the mainstream for purposes of its independent development.
http://www.anus.com/metal
Metal began in prototype form with Black Sabbath, the blues band that shifted into heavy gothic industrial rock to express the massive dread of modern life they expounded upon through many metaphors. Their trademark occultism symbolized life in terms of the eternal and ideal, while their gritty, sensual, lawless guitar gave significance to the immediate and real. The resulting fusion of the bohemian generation with a nihilistic, dark and morbid streak birthed early metal. Those who had rejected the hippies and found no solace in social order embraced this music and lost bohemians everywhere began to find new directions in this sound.
Its influences were many: the grainy howl of primitive blues, the majestic sound shaping of classical works, and the rising anti-rock/heavy rock culture. Bands such as King Crimson/Robert Fripp, Blue Cheer, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Link Wray, MC5, Dick Dale, Cream, The Who and Jimi Hendrix all contributed to a need for a more textural but more abstract sound in intense rock. When Black Sabbath stepped out of their rock training to write the first arguably metal, as distinct from other forms of popular music, songs, they spawned a genre which would despite a loss of its influential technique to other styles continue mutating for three decades at the time of this writing. (A great deal of influence also came from Roma guitar player Django Reinhardt, who like Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi was limited in motion to only two fingers on his fretboard hand.)
Having been thus born of the blues tradition early metal remained much within that framework, with a dual tradition existing in Black Sabbath, the proto-metal architecturalists, and Led Zeppelin, the blues-rock extravagantists who stayed within the boundaries of the rock/blues tradition. Through 1970s as the British metal bands continued to rule and even through the rise of the American speed metal bands, metal remained despite its ferocity and pummeling use of muted-strumming technique essentially more extreme creations of the original ideal, an independent journeyman blues lament to chronicle a wanderlife, updated with the nihilistic speed of industrial hardcore rock.
While the 1970s struggled to develop further the innovations in rock between 1965-1969 the influences that hit metal were the most intense bands at the time: the ecclectic but intense progressive rock emerging from Europe. In adopted styles of American bands, these musicians used classical theory to give narrative context to themes which in the popular music style, repeat through cycling short complementary phrases or riffs before going to chorus or bridging to pre-resolution. Their technique, bringing exactness to jazz and classical styles not yet fully adapted from acoustic guitar, stood in opposition to the looser jams of Led Zeppelin in that it espoused structure over improvisation and was often played in near replica of the album recording.
As metal grew in the middle 1970s, its fragmented nature brought it both commercial success and hilarity as a retarded younger brother to rock. The blues side merged with late model progressive rock and became stadium metal, which brought metal to its highest popularity ever but degraded the authentic nature of the material as its focus dissolved into hedonism, technicality and showmanship. While acts like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Motorhead represented metal as a public innovation, the more obscure and threatening NWOBHM bands arose with the subgenre in the 1970s to oppose commercial slickness with direct and primal music. Angel Witch and Diamond Head and eventually Venom tore technique to its basics to get to the ballad-meets-firefight balance of rebel music.
When hardcore punk grew out of nowhere to become the most radiant overturning of values in popular culture, metal faded in the public eye as its excess failed to bring corresponding extremities and, as was found in extreme hardcore music, dissident ideologies which were more pragmatic than whining antipathy or indulgence. Anarchy, anti-authoritarianism, nihilism and alienation came pouring through this music and with it came an ideology of dissidence and independent action. The Exploited, Discharge and the Misfits stunned the world awake to artistic withdrawl and post-social thinking. Metal converged for the attack. (Hardcore was a subset of punk, which between roughly 1965 and 1974 was simple 1950s rock played by garage bands before the genre solidified in aesthetic as opposition music, producing an underground ultra-minimalist version which removed the "rock" from punk to make finely nihilistic music. Tracking the origin of this genre is difficult, as for many it is rock played with power chords to a basic tempo, but Mötorhead, The Ramones and The Stooges deserve mention.)
The initial lunge of proto-post-"heavy metal" metal, via thrash and speed metal arising simultaneously in hybrid form of metal/hardcore, seemed at the time and remains abruptly adolescent yet resoundingly honest. Its unresolved questions and finite tolerance for the dualism of social and personal truth gave this movement inertia even into the commercial realm, which was for the most part unexplored until Metallica gave the go-ahead with 1992's "Metallica." At its inception a genre of palm-muted, Morse-codish riffs and epic song structures the speed metal of the 1980s held out until the 1990s before being absorbed into groove-addicted Pantera or Prong clones, open melody bouncing hard rock like Metallica, or the same indulgent, ornate, inconclusive self-gratification that bore metal into avalanche under its own weight in the 1970s.
The tendency in speed metal to use progressive stylings and structures within savagery, and ethic of finding more in life than rejection (many metalheads of the day saw punk as fatalistic and ineffective, while punks would call metalheads elitists) and gory more than political imagery merged with the fast and elemental riffing of thrash bands to set the stage for a new style to emerge. In 1984, metal would begin another branching process: fast bands like Slayer, percussive bands like Exodus, grinding bands like Possessed and bizarre poetic and minimalist offerings diversely spread between Sodom, Nuclear Assault, Bathory and Celtic Frost. This gave rise in the mid-1980s to a condition where aboveground bands like Megadeth or Testament played to large crowds as death/speed metal hybrids like Destruction, Kreator and Rigor Mortis laid the groundwork for the renaissance of death metal. These genres in turn would fulfill the promise of thrash and separate metal from the mainstream for purposes of its independent development.
http://www.anus.com/metal
Thanks for that post- I found it very informative- it help[s me clear up my King Crimson post also
Don Corleone
Emre
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