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.