I have next to no history listening to metal, but have been putting some on the past couple days. This article was a trove of band names. I want to listen to more and find more artists but I'm not really sure the best way to go about it. I've thrown on Cannibal Corpse from knowing the name from somewhere and Nekrogoblikon because I remembered that one music video, but beyond that I'm not really sure who to listen to. Anyone have any recommendations?
'k. So Cannibal Corpse is awful. They really are. Mixed 'em twice and my sister had all their albums, but it's basically Celtic Frost with disgusting lyrics. I suspect I'm going to be pilloried but here's the five albums I'd start with: 1) Sepultura - Chaos A.D. Sepultura are probably the most accomplished of the thrash metal crowd. 2) Metallica - Master of Puppets. Early, angry, heartful Metallica. Technical chops, decent lyrics and a lot of strength. 3) Judas Priest - Painkiller. Basically, Halford's best contribution to metal. It's hailed as a "comeback" album but it's more accurate to call it a swan song. 4) Fear Factory - Manufacture. Fear Factory pretty much dominate the industrial metal camp. I'd argue that Ministry is better but Ministry is less metal. 5) Iron Maiden - The Number of the Beast. Possibly Maiden's best, and certainly lays the framework for all the power metal that followed. Note that ALL that shit is ancient. There's a lot more modern stuff, but this is the stuff that stands the test of time. _________________ARGUING COMMENCES BELOW_____________
Good list. That Sepultura album is a must listen to. Ride the Lightening was my very first exposure to guerrilla marketing. I was on the way out of High School when that album dropped. The losers and freaks were into Motorhead and Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and life was good. Then one kid shows up with RtL and it was like an earthquake went off. The local Tower Records sold out, and nobody else carried anything that was not top 40. This started a two year love affair with Tower Records, which for you youngsters was a building full of records, tapes and posters full of music dorks. We begged to get more albums, and If I remember right we had to wait for them to sign on with Elecktra(?) to ramp up production. That first kid was responsible for about 30-40 album sales. the only way to be cooler than having the album was having a tshirt. Recall this is before the Internet and direct sales of concert tshirts. A friend of mine at the time drove up to San fran to see them in concert and took about $700 of our cash and bought almost every shirt they had for sale, took them back and distributed them. I think we kicked in for gas for the trip. Master of Puppets may actually be the very first Compact Disk I bought and owned. Ride was Vinyl of that I an certain; I bought a new stereo to play Metallica and that would have been when I was just out of High School. Also, I thought that Cannibal Corpse was a goof band, more a parody than a serious thing. That true? I'd add Megadeth Cryptic Writings to that list. That is a link to the 16 tracks on the album. Tagging byonic
...And Justice For All came out in 8th Grade. We'd fallen pretty far by then. I remember being astounded that a girl in my class didn't like Def Leppard because holy shit, that was some inoffensive, feel-good easy listenin' music, by damn! What did she like? Duran Duran. No, worse than that. Whatever Simon LeBon's non-Duran Duran album was. I mean, yeah, okay. Duran Duran had a hell of a run but that shit was dated when it came out. I lived in concert shirts... pretty much well into my '30s. Without tours I'd have had nothing to wear. Cannibal Corpse isn't a serious thing. They enjoy singing about meat hook sodomy. FUN FACT: Autocomplete in Youtube when you type "meat hook" is "sodomoy." Nothing wrong with singing about meat hook sodomy. It's just very much not my thing. It's not lots of people's thing. And it's pretty much the only thing Cannibal Corpse sings about.
In no particular order, and for no particular reason other than they're bands I dig. If you are lucky, francopoli, kleinbl00, nowaypablo or AshleyR might have things for you too. Anaal Nathrakh Gnaw Their Tongues Mayhem Motorhead Satyricon Arch Enemy Nile Minsk Jucifer My Dying Bride Grails Down Tiamat Corrosion of Conformity Ministry Tvangeste Author & Punisher
Replying to you cause tagged. I can definitely confirm this article's thesis from my own experience. Metal, heavy metal and hard rock are huge in Armenia, where youth culture is exploding at a rate that is exhilarating to see, youth movements and social/political activism would be booming more and more every time I would visit in the summer. It all peaked last year during over centennial of the Armenian Genocide, when System of a Down put a stage up in the central square of the capital city, shut everything down, and rattled up the largest collective youth gathering in the capital's history for a free and fucking incredible show in a fucking rainstorm. I once helped organized a music festival, the first of its kind in Armenia, where proceeds would go to fixing up the school building of the nearby village, who's residents supplied us an open field on top of a hill, and whose children came in droves twice a night carrying barrels of homemade pomegranate wine. The festival grounds' view of the mountainous Armenian landscape and a cavernous valley below–- even the nature around us screamed metal. I didn't handle the booking of the bands, but even if I did it was clear that the only bands around were fucking metal. The one band who came up with acoustic instruments? They did Led Zeppelin covers. Black Dog was the quietest performance of the whole weekend. I think it's about frustration, power, and the enabling of a socially and culturally oppressed youth to start pushing shit around with the help of these bands who tell them, "Desperation is still an opportunity." I guess my point is, I don't understand the metal sub-genre breakdown enough to know what counts as heavy metal, but listen to System of a Down. :D
I bet you may enjoy the documentaries Global Metal and Metal: A Headbanger's Journey.
Holy shit. 'member back when Nuclear Blast was like four people? HOLY SHITAt Nuclear Blast Records, one of metal’s biggest independent labels, global retail sales rose last year to 2.53 million albums, up from 2.25 million in 2014 and 1.84 million in 2013. In the late 1990s and 2000s, Nuclear Blast made a bet on bands with a potential to sell well globally, such as Norway’s Dimmu Borgir and California veterans Exodus, says Gerardo Martinez, U.S. manager for Nuclear Blast. Since he joined the company in 2003, payroll has doubled to 200 employees in five offices including Germany and Brazil.
In December, Tengger Cavalry, a group formed in Beijing by musician and throat singer Nature Ganganbaigal that is now based in New York City, played a sold-out Christmas Eve show at Carnegie Hall.
The problem with talking about heavy metal in a mainstream publication is that metal appeals to people who are not necessarily a part of the conversation. Metal heads are losers. dorks. Probably on drugs. Lowlifes. Long haired weirdos who dress funny. Big scary dudes with tattoos. The guys who hang out in shop class because they have no future and are not going to go to college. The type of people you build gated communities to keep away from. The guys like me that found metal back in the day and the hardcore metalheads are not welcome to have a conversation in the WSJ. People talk about metal fans, but never with them in articles like this. Everything I needed to know about metal I learned in my first mosh pit. It was at a Slayer concert. It was chaotic, insane, crazy, over the top, completely off the rails. People were slamming into each other, giant guys in boots and no shirts where grabbing people and throwing them into the center of the maelstrom. And yet, there were no true assholes. Someone goes down, 2-3 others grabbed them and shoved them to the side so they didn't get trampled. Mosh pits are amazing, and no video, no description does them justice. Here is a big circle pit NSFW audio. Watch the guys running into the circles. Here is a poor video of a good time the best of the quick search for a smaller pit and yea the audio on all these is not that great so you want to turn it down or mute, sorry about that. It is hard to describe the why looking at video like that. It is even harder to describe what it is like to have 2000-3000 sweaty drunken bastards flailing around on the floor of a concert venue while music so loud it hurts in your lungs is blared at you. One of the best pits I think I was ever at was at Primus during the Tour de Formage where they played the whole Sailing the seas of Cheese album. The room they were in was some warehouse, and they sold some 5K tickets and every one of those jerks was in the general admission area. They played 'Johnny was a Racecar Driver" and the combined movement of that mass of humanity sent shudders through the floor that you could feel like an earthquake. The screaming drowned out the band. And I was somewhere about 50 or so people from the stage doing everything my old ass could to stay standing up. It was glorious. Metal, and mosh pits by extension are popular, at least in my mind because of the people they attract. Maybe the people that are attracted to these events make them? Sort of a chicken-egg problem isn't it. In the pit you are not the weird looking burnout, the dorky ass nerd, the dork who is too smart for his own good, the loser, the outsider. Nope, in the pit you are family with a few hundred strangers drawn together to vent and release pent up energy from dealing with the other people in your life. If you've never been in a venue like this, I'm not sure I can explain it. But trust me, it's an amazing experience. And before you think I'm taking a crap on the article, I'm not. This is the same thing I've seen a few times here and there in the press. But the guy has an interesting taste in music and some of the bands he is writing about are not bad (from what I can tell). I just with he had more conversation with the fans. And holy shit Babymetal is going to tour the US this year! One of the true regrets I have is that here in the Ohio Valley we get nothing concert wise except shitty Portland "indie" bands and country acts. In the last few years I have managed to drive a few hours to see Fintroll, Amon Amarth, Apocalyptica, Primus, and Suicidal Tendencies but that is it. I miss the Metal scene in California.
LOVE this post. BAM! Preach it. Your view of the metal scene from the mosh pit is fundamentally different than mine... yet oddly the same. I remember when the punk tradition of moshing crossed over to metal, and it destroyed metal shows for me. It was at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, at a Primus show for their second album... probably 1990. People started a mosh pit, and Les stopped the show. "What the fuck are you doing?! Stop it man. This ain't no punk show..." and counted the song back in, and they began playing again. But that was the year that you stopped being able to get anywhere near the stage, and had to turn the room over to the pit. Despite that change, metal was still metal, and seeing someone else wearing a metal shirt, or with hair down to their shoulder blades resulted in eye contact, and that chin-up head nod. "Yo." The closest thing to a "metal" show I have been to in the last five years was Blue Oyster Cult at a fucking casino, man. But I have spent my time in a tent at an outdoor festival with Napalm Death, seen Rammstein in Slovakia, hung out with Eluveitie the one time they came to Seattle, and wished like hell I'd gone to the Anthrax/Public Enemy show that I missed. And everything in your post - including the mosh pit - still fills that metal part of my heart with happiness. There is just something universal about metal. \m/ People talk about metal fans, but never with them in articles like this.
AHAHAHAHAHH I was at that concert! It was late 1989 after the Loma Prieta Earthquake during the World Series. We got a check to pay for damages to our stuff inside the house, and as young people should do, we spent the money on parties and concerts. Primus was right after Christmas and my family was pissed that I was going back to San Fran because there was work up there. If you remember the rowdy crowd of angry, mean looking punk jerks in green Ireland shirts who kept starting the pit back up, that was us.I remember when the punk tradition of moshing crossed over to metal, and it destroyed metal shows for me. It was at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, at a Primus show for their second album... probably 1990. People started a mosh pit, and Les stopped the show. "What the fuck are you doing?! Stop it man. This ain't no punk show..."
WOOHOO!! Amazingly small world, innit? Yeah, I was up a level in back, off the floor. So wasn't in the pit. For a couple years I'd been watching Primus play for free every Wednesday night at the I-Beam on Haight Street, with about 15 other people. So I went to the Warfield show mostly out of solidarity for the band. Not because I was going to see anything different or unusual. But then the moshing started, and ... well, I guess I saw something new! :-)
It's funny how different your experience was. Primus getting cranky over moshing because Primus ain't punk. By way of comparison when I saw the Sundays in Santa Fe in 1992, Harriet was horrified that people were moshing because holy shit people this is upbeat dreampop! But... you know... us outsider nerds didn't really know how to go to a concert and not mosh. It's all we knew. Seven years in Los Angeles cured me of seeing any and all shows (although I mixed a couple songs for Eagles of Death Metal). LA has got to be the least metal metropolis in all the world. I will say that I was one of the many people old enough to know better the last time Ministry came to town.
I felt a little strange posting a WSJ article on metal, but I really love hearing about metalheads (and goths, and punks, and noise dudes, and ...) around the world because it's like there's a unity among malcontents everywhere, and I'm not going to post every blog and forum post I come across because Hubski is a low-traffic site and easy to flood. Odd publication or no, it was nice to have a survey to post. I loves me some Agalloch, and I am not ashamed.One of the true regrets I have is that here in the Ohio Valley we get nothing concert wise except shitty Portland "indie" bands and country acts.
Nor should you be ashamed. Agalloch is awesome, but they don't really fit into a box that makes marketing the band and finding a bigger audience easy. I did not realize that 1. they are from Portland and 2. they have been around for 20 freaking years. I'm sort of sad that Epica did not catch on with my circle of friends. I'm also not ashamed to say that I like Sigur Ros which gets lumped into the "metal" category. And yea, I found a few neat metal bands from of all the possible places the Wall Street Fucking Journal. Great find, great link, thanks man.I loves me some Agalloch, and I am not ashamed.
Epica is great, but I can see writing them off. There were a lot of bands doing the Theatre of Tragedy soprano and growls vocal thing popping up at the same time they did, and most of them were not as good as Theatre of Tragedy.