I only recently discovered Blind Guardian. Typically listened to thrash, rarely power metal. Man, what excellence. Brilliant vocals, great choruses, distinct and unique sense of melody both on guitar and vocals. Something I really love about them is that vocals, guitars, and drums all have very prominent and distinct parts. In many bands I feel like one instrument will often dominate and the band becomes boring. I.e. great vocals, no guitar solos or great guitar but could care less for vocals. When I started listening to Blind Guardian and heard a chorus for the first time, I thought “Dang that was awesome, but I bet the guitar solo will suck or not exist”…and MAN was I wrong. Brilliant vocals and brilliant guitar work. And then that drumming is just always going. My life is 2% better for having found them.
I still consider "Nightfall in middle earth" one of the best albums of all times. I remember waiting in front of the recordstore on the releasday in 1998, came home and listened to it from start to finish a few times while reading the newest "Rock Hard" magazine, good times. Even today it's one of the few albums I still enjoy listening from start to finish.
I discovered that album in 1999 (via Hansi's "Demons and Wizards" project with Iced Earth), and it's one of the few metal albums I still listen to regularly 25 years later. (It really helps if you've read some of the Silmarillion, of course.) Hard to pick a favorite track since it's so consistently excellent, but maybe "The Curse of Feanor" gets the most play.
Also, attending a BG concert at the old Graceland in Seattle back in 2004 or so and singing along to "The Bard's Song" with a few hundred other fans who knew all the words was definitely a peak geek moment.
The start of “Into the storm” after Morgoth says “She, the mistress of her own lust” on a spoken intro track gives me the shivers to this day and I still consider it the best banging start of the album I have ever heard.
I definitely consider NIME to be best BG album. They tried to replicate the same level of complexity in their follow up albums, but the sound engineering and mixing just never felt the same. NIME sounds crisp and clear and every after is too layered and muddy
Here in Spain they were arguably the biggest power metal band ever. Shirts with their art were very common - a tier below Maiden shirts, but putting up a respectable fight in popularity. They also filled some of the best venues - not stadiums, but the tier right below, the premium venues, which I think is a great achievement for such a niche genre.
When I was a kid I loved some of their classics like Mirror Mirror, but I wasn't as much into them as some of my entourage, as I preferred other styles of vocals. Recently however I've come to appreciate them again because Spotify suggested "Sacred Worlds" from the album Edge of Time. I love fully orchestrated metal - Metallica's S&M with the San Fran Symphonic or Nightwish's Once with the London Philarmonic - and "Sacred Worlds" is an absolute banger within this rare subgenre.
It's funny, "Mirror Mirror" is the biggest hit from NIME but it's my least favorite track on the album. I'm not a huge fan overall of ANATO but "Precious Jerusalem" might be their most epic chorus ever.
Blind Guardian is well known in Europe, but very little overseas. I went to a concert once and the mood was really good. The crowd sang for themselves for half an hour. The band was going for 3 hours altogether. Everyone was friendly (nothing else I expected with power metal).
In fairness, early BG very much aligns more with speed metal, which is a fairly close sibling to thrash. It was that vector that got me into them more than my latter appreciation for power metal in all its bombastic soaring-vocal glory.
European/german power metal bands tend to be more speed metal based. American power metal retained closeness to heavy metal more. I would recommend him to try out bands like Helstar and Jag Panzer next.
If you like thrash and great vocals, check out Forbidden if you haven't. Late 80s early 90s technical thrash whose singer has some wild range. Twisted Into Form is their best album IMO. Their reunion album Omega Wave is also excellent.
Had a very similar feel when I discovered Domine as a teenager… the temes are also very varied. You can see what the band was reading (in terms of fantasy novels) through the years :)
One thing that's changed my metal taste is going to metal festivals that mish mash everything together and making an effort to just go see bands who I have no idea about even if I listen to their music and am unsure about liking it.
One of my favorite things about metal is how diverse it is and sometimes it just gets silly even if it appears absolutely serious - I think seeing the bands when they are having the most fun let's them try things you won't see in their music or videos or even on a regular tour.
In case anyone is into video games and power metal and lives somewhere near Madison WI there is a festival called Mad With Power my wife found last year that falls into the bucket of how is this even a thing but it's a joy to experience.
There are also a few metal cruises I've been on that are absolutely not what you'd expect and are mostly people hugging everyone and have things like cupcake decorating classes.
If you ever get a chance, I'd recommend seeing either of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra touring bands. Their show is a pretty spectacular mishmash of everything... and Christmas.
> There are also a few metal cruises I've been on that are absolutely not what you'd expect and are mostly people hugging everyone and have things like cupcake decorating classes.
What cruises are you talking about? I've been on seven iterations of the US-based 70kTons cruise, which AFAIK is the oldest and biggest metal cruise. And while people there are generally very friendly and awesome, I've never seen cupcake decorating classes. Instead, people were discussing drum techniques, beer and whisky, metal music and concerts...pretty much exactly what you'd expect on such an event. The most exquisite topics were probably politics and costumes (there's sort of an unofficial costume contest on the last day of that cruise).
If you like the harder blind guardian songs more (like mirror mirror) have a look at the band Persuader. The singer somewhat randomly sounds like Hansi kürsch and all their songs are more towards speed/heavy metal but with clear power metal influence.
I found power metal because I was looking for a more positive sub-genre of metal. What I was listening to before often had ahrimanic themes - death, violence, satanism etc.
I grew up on power metal and nowadays I mainly listen to two genres: black metal and classical music. One of the things they have in common is that I can't understand a word in either. I really appreciate that because I find lyrics in songs distracting and most of the time cringy.
I can't listen to music with vocals at work, but I still listen to power metal 20 years later in quite a few contexts - gym, car, walk, simply active listening. I can't argue with the quality of the lyrics being cringey though.
I've always thought it's a combination of the genre being niche and being founded on a set of lyrical themes that are restrictive - and maybe particularly challenging -, and also, the fact that a lot of these bands aren't from English-speaking countries. The bands from anglo countries like Kamelot tend to write acceptable lyrics within the power metal context (Manowar lyrics are hilarious at times and arguably well-written, but they are not power metal IMO). There are some noteable exceptions to non-anglo bands with polished lyrics, like perhaps Nightwish or Blind Guardian, but a common occurrence otherwise is to find shitty English, which at least for me is an instant turnoff.
There's a lot of overlap between metal and classical music (by which I mean orchestral, symphonic, and chamber, not the specific age). Something about the composition and structure of the music activates similar parts of my brain, and both are excellent to work to.
(Of course, there's only so far you can push this—some metal bands are much closer to pop or jazz, and some classical music is quite distinctively its own thing.)
Almost the same for me, It's either blackmetal, classic or some ambient which works best for me when I want to concentrate on something. But sometimes I still need to listen to some good old cheesy Powermetal, sing along and feel like I should start immediately to conquer the world to defeat all the evil that is out there. ;)
Have you heard neo-classical metal? It's shredding at its finest. Yngwie Malmsteen is the OG, but there are many others I recommend like Hizaki and Syu. Guitarists in this subgenre often release solo albums (no vocals) so you won't find yourself distracted by lyrics.
I enjoy death metal because it is aggressive and brutal. It also spans everything from just good ol' vengeance music to literally galactic conquest.
Whatever the case, this kind of music helps me CRUSH the problem at hand. When nothing seems to be working, headbang for a little bit or make a solo mosh pit in my office, and then get back to DESTROYING the problem.
I found power metal when I was a kid because one of the things I like the most about rock and metal are operatic but growly vocals. I consider some of the singers in this list, like Jorn Lande (Masterplan, Ark), Oliver Hartmann (At Vance) and Michael Kiske (Helloween) some of the best singers in the history of rock, period.
Power metal is either brazen ego worship and/or or similarly (to death metal) talking of topics like mass murders and rapes. Though unlike the more neutral/clinical approach of death metal, power metal lyrics usually come from an angle of glorifying these things.
edit: I am merely relaying the common lyrical subjects of the genre. I made no judgment whether its a good or bad thing.
Impressive work. I believe Encyclopaedia Metallum[0] would be a better source for the corpus, though the noise rate would be higher as there are many one-song/single/demo album bands, along with bands making music in multiple genres in different eras in their lifetime.
The ability to find lyrics on lyric sites would be a reasonable proxy for sufficient popularity, I’d imagine.
On a semi-related note, when talking about large genre-specific corpuses, https://vgmdb.net has a fascinating scope definition across all things game and animation adjacent, including both the massive doujin (fan-made) music scene and the full discographies of many j-pop artists and composers, all annotated by franchise adjacency with (often) full staff credits: https://vgmdb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=22321
It’s a fascinating corpus and one I’d love to analyze deeply one day.
Encyclopaedia Metallum is an amazing resource, it's also quite scrapable.
I managed to quickly throw thogether a set of small bash scripts to crossreference the midgard [0] leaks with metal artists.
[0] The midgard (Nazi online shop) sales record was leaked, including personal information, so I won't link it here
I think it's mutually inclusive since the interests are shared by some - I've found a bunch of business intelligence nerds at metal festivals running stats on everything they can get data for.
For example the metal cruise festival I go on has a group that made their own bands on board tracking app and they release stats on who wants to see what bands and if people marked later that they enjoyed it, etc.
I've commented on a lot of tangential topics in this thread, but regarding the article, I find the clustering really impressive. I know a lot of these bands and going by feel I broadly agree with a lot of the groupings. Perhaps it's not exhaustive or perfect, for example I would intuit Blind Guardian to be much closer to Demons & Wizards, because both of those bands share lyricists and themes, but the analysis otherwise nails many of the tuples. For example, Helloween - Gamma Ray - Masterplan or Edguy - Avantasia, where both groupings' bands shared lyricists. I also agree with other not-so-obvious groupings like Kamelot - Angra - Stratovarius or Falconer - Dream Evil - Hammerfall - Nocturnal Rites.
> For people who might not know, Rhapsody of Fire broke into in two bands, one keeping the original name and the other becoming Rhapsody.
Ehm, this is not what happened.
In 2006 Rhapsody became Rhapsody of Fire to avoid some trademark dispute.
Then they split around 2009, though the main chunk is still called Rhapsody of Fire whereas the spinoff is called Luca Turilli's Rhapsody.
The trademark dispute was with the Rhapsody streaming service - I don't think it was ever announced, but I suspect the streaming service paid them money to change their name since the band definitely came first.
I tried googling a bit but I couldn't find quickly enough an article that mentions Rhapsody, the streaming service, as the other party in the trademark dispute.
However, I do remember the whole thing when it happened because I had just discovered the band.
People not familiar with metal music may find it interesting to learn that actor Sir Christopher Lee - or, Lord of the Rings's "Saruman" - was an active part of the power metal scene in the later stages of his life.
I listen to Power Metal only because it is the closest genre to classical Heavy Metal (Iron Maiden, Ozzy Osbourne,Motörhead, Judas Priest) and almost no band sings classical Heavy Metal anymore.
Trad revival is a big thing these days. But I think there is something subtle about even older power metal that sometimes makes it a bit different from something you'd class as "plain" speed metal. Its a bit hard to put in words precisely. But that is why I love the genre so much. I am not so much into pure speed metal or thrash metal.
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Also, attending a BG concert at the old Graceland in Seattle back in 2004 or so and singing along to "The Bard's Song" with a few hundred other fans who knew all the words was definitely a peak geek moment.
When I was a kid I loved some of their classics like Mirror Mirror, but I wasn't as much into them as some of my entourage, as I preferred other styles of vocals. Recently however I've come to appreciate them again because Spotify suggested "Sacred Worlds" from the album Edge of Time. I love fully orchestrated metal - Metallica's S&M with the San Fran Symphonic or Nightwish's Once with the London Philarmonic - and "Sacred Worlds" is an absolute banger within this rare subgenre.
One thing of note: I essentially only listen to metal and classical. Everything else is dead boring to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Except in Japan (1).
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwPlMB_dAo8
Let me remedy this https://youtu.be/i-IcX_bccFc
One of my favorite things about metal is how diverse it is and sometimes it just gets silly even if it appears absolutely serious - I think seeing the bands when they are having the most fun let's them try things you won't see in their music or videos or even on a regular tour.
In case anyone is into video games and power metal and lives somewhere near Madison WI there is a festival called Mad With Power my wife found last year that falls into the bucket of how is this even a thing but it's a joy to experience.
There are also a few metal cruises I've been on that are absolutely not what you'd expect and are mostly people hugging everyone and have things like cupcake decorating classes.
Sadly, Vitalij Kuprij just passed. :/
https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/music/trans-siberian-orchestr...
What cruises are you talking about? I've been on seven iterations of the US-based 70kTons cruise, which AFAIK is the oldest and biggest metal cruise. And while people there are generally very friendly and awesome, I've never seen cupcake decorating classes. Instead, people were discussing drum techniques, beer and whisky, metal music and concerts...pretty much exactly what you'd expect on such an event. The most exquisite topics were probably politics and costumes (there's sort of an unofficial costume contest on the last day of that cruise).
I've always thought it's a combination of the genre being niche and being founded on a set of lyrical themes that are restrictive - and maybe particularly challenging -, and also, the fact that a lot of these bands aren't from English-speaking countries. The bands from anglo countries like Kamelot tend to write acceptable lyrics within the power metal context (Manowar lyrics are hilarious at times and arguably well-written, but they are not power metal IMO). There are some noteable exceptions to non-anglo bands with polished lyrics, like perhaps Nightwish or Blind Guardian, but a common occurrence otherwise is to find shitty English, which at least for me is an instant turnoff.
(Of course, there's only so far you can push this—some metal bands are much closer to pop or jazz, and some classical music is quite distinctively its own thing.)
Have you heard neo-classical metal? It's shredding at its finest. Yngwie Malmsteen is the OG, but there are many others I recommend like Hizaki and Syu. Guitarists in this subgenre often release solo albums (no vocals) so you won't find yourself distracted by lyrics.
See songs like We Got The Moves on YouTube. Music can be really heavy and still all about fun.
Whatever the case, this kind of music helps me CRUSH the problem at hand. When nothing seems to be working, headbang for a little bit or make a solo mosh pit in my office, and then get back to DESTROYING the problem.
edit: I am merely relaying the common lyrical subjects of the genre. I made no judgment whether its a good or bad thing.
Dead Comment
0. https://www.metal-archives.com/
On a semi-related note, when talking about large genre-specific corpuses, https://vgmdb.net has a fascinating scope definition across all things game and animation adjacent, including both the massive doujin (fan-made) music scene and the full discographies of many j-pop artists and composers, all annotated by franchise adjacency with (often) full staff credits: https://vgmdb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=22321
It’s a fascinating corpus and one I’d love to analyze deeply one day.
[0] The midgard (Nazi online shop) sales record was leaked, including personal information, so I won't link it here
For example the metal cruise festival I go on has a group that made their own bands on board tracking app and they release stats on who wants to see what bands and if people marked later that they enjoyed it, etc.
Is it common to talk about data science in metal forums?
Kudos to the author!
Ehm, this is not what happened. In 2006 Rhapsody became Rhapsody of Fire to avoid some trademark dispute. Then they split around 2009, though the main chunk is still called Rhapsody of Fire whereas the spinoff is called Luca Turilli's Rhapsody.
I tried googling a bit but I couldn't find quickly enough an article that mentions Rhapsody, the streaming service, as the other party in the trademark dispute.
However, I do remember the whole thing when it happened because I had just discovered the band.
Feels like ages ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lee#Music_career
Take those to BandCamp/Metal Archives and look for "bands like" these and you'll see there are hundreds of UK, Canadian and Swedish bands.
There is also the ever awesome Jorn (Swe) still putting out amazing Heavy Metal.
Hope that helps. No need to listen to power metal ;)
Also, a point of interest: Riot City and Traveler are both from Calgary.
Vancouver, Calgary and Quebec City are sort of the trio of metal in Canada; AFAICT.
- A Norwegian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_wave_of_traditional_heavy_...
This should probably be your next stop:
https://www.youtube.com/@NWOTHMFullAlbums
And here's a small selection of some of my favourites from that new wave:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsmrGn_1E13fBQkyefFGu...
That’s just not true, at all. Just look for the "trad[itional]" genre. I don’t enjoy it, but there are a lot of releases there.
edit: Or just combine heavy metal and either hard rock or thrash on something like RYM, that should also give you a lot of those. Here’s Hard Rock + Heavy Metal for the 2020s: https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/album/2020s/g:all,hard%...
https://www.youtube.com/@NWOTHMFullAlbums