Royal Jester - extremely awesome happy sugar metal!

Oh, no question the happy stuff is a niche market, but those who love it are every bit as fanatical about it as fans of the darker stuff.

Metal's roots are in darkness, after all. I wonder what the first happy, upbeat metal album would be?

Not quite metal, but a direct precursor and probably the root of all this flowery crap:

Sweet-Desolation Boulevard (a dubious classic!)

...and before anyone gets their daisies and pansies all ruffled, I use "crap" loosely...as I do like a few of the "happy metal" bands, but for me its rather limited to only the top tier bands of this quite "niched" genre and in small doses for, lets face it...heavy metal is supposed to be, uh, heavy, dark, mean, brooding, and brutal!
 
That's where metal's roots lie, but the genre keeps expanding. Metal was never supposed to be introspective or intellectual either, but then Queensryche and Dream Theater came along and now you've got a million different concept albums that try to tell stories so complex not even the artists can explain them fully.
 
"This album is a story about a girl who slips into a magic box and sees the past, present, and future, but then she finds out its an alternative universe. She has to seek out the Ultimate Truth, and she is being chased by the Metatronic Obliqueness which seeks to devour her chi. She finds a companion along the way(DC Cooper), a being of pure energy who guides her on her path. She finds out that the Metatronic Obliqueness is actually a computer, and it's been luring her to its lair all along. When she gets there, it changes her into a man, so that she can have intercourse with it and produce a race of evil cyborgs. That's where the thumping and Barry White samples on Track 5 come in. In order to defeat the evil cyborgs bent on conquering the multiverse, she has to use the Power of Thought, which she can only learn to harness by seeking out the Great Ebullient Glutamate. She finds him(Jon Oliva), and he explains to her that the power is inside her and all it takes is another song for her to realize that she can defeat the cyborgs with her Power of Thought. The story ends with her waking up in a hospital, wondering if it was all a dream."
 
That's where metal's roots lie, but the genre keeps expanding. Metal was never supposed to be introspective or intellectual either, but then Queensryche and Dream Theater came along and now you've got a million different concept albums that try to tell stories so complex not even the artists can explain them fully.

"Cough, cough" Tobias Sammet Avantasia's Scarecrow trilogy "cough, cough."