Metalheads like naming things. Whether we’re talking stage names (always a little dodgy if your band was formed after 1995), area-specific entities (“Eh, I prefer the Stockholm sound – the Gothenburg bands were too soft”), or the obsessive allegiance to micro-categorization required to differentiate between almost-but-not-quite-identical subgenres (goregrind and pornogrind, for example), we as a group take great pleasure in cataloguing and defining.
In some regards, devoting oneself to metal fandom is rather like starting a baseball card collection; one is required to acquire a huge amount of knowledge about a certain type of item, much of it based on dates, affiliations, and statistics, as well as a nuclear stockpile of said physical items, and then, on top of it all, the ability to recall any shred of arcane knowledge with lightning speed. Minutiae make our world go ’round, and our nerdy tendencies are more a mark of dedication than anything negative. It takes a lot of love to memorize a particular player’s stats, just as much as committing Sarcofago’s entire discography – bootlegs included – to memory does.
Bands hate seeing their music pigeonholed, stamped with a label, and tucked neatly away alongside their peers, but we as fans and as writers just can’t tear ourselves away from our beloved little genre nametags (“Hi, my name is Black/Thrash! Not to be confused with Thrash over there, or with Black Metal glowering at you from that corner, god forbid you mix us up lest Dio himself appear and bid you with a stern point of his gnarled finger to LEAVE THE HALL!”).
Why, though? Why does it even matter? At the heart of it all, it’s still just “metal,” right? That’s easy to say, but much tougher to put into practice. It’s a lot easier on a listener if, instead of sitting down to absorb a well-written, lengthy review that thoroughly examines the various aspects of a piece of music in loving detail, one can simply glance down, read the words “tech death” or “blackened doom”, make a snap decision, then go about one’s day, right? This is precisely why bands despise being slapped with a genre label so very much – it isolates them, and gives them no chance to appeal to newcomers. It bolsters musical prejudices (“Oh, they play funeral doom? I hate that shit, they must be boring”), and crams them into a box in which they can barely draw breath. Genre labeling is lazy and aggravating, and yet we thrive upon it.
As metal continues to evolve and invert and pervert itself, traditional titles no longer cut it, and we reach for greater levels of complexity in our compartmentalization. Does the term “black metal” really do justice to a band like Deathspell Omega any more, let alone something like Oranssi Pazuzu? What about Opeth – they’re not simply a “death metal” band anymore, are they? How much do Funebrarum and At the Gates have in common, besides the ubiquitous “death metal” tag? It can get messy.
At the beginning, there was no need for any of it. There was only heavy metal – no more, no less (unless you really want to get into things like hard rock, and acid rock, and blues rock…). From there, the circle expanded, spreading out from Birmingham all the way across the globe, growing and changing with every passing year. Soon enough, we had thrash metal, death metal, black metal, traditional metal, and doom – umbrellas terms for specific sounds and scenes that crossed over and intermarried and, within a few years’ time, spawned litter upon litter of musical mutants. Doom metal has spilled over into stoner doom, death/doom, funeral doom, black/doom, progressive doom, traditional doom, gothic doom, sludge, atmospheric sludge, black/sludge, drone, post-doom… that’s a long way from “Behind the Wall of Sleep”, and that’s merely one example. Black metal in particular has gone absolutely berserk (“avant-garde black metal”? What does that even mean?), with even regression-loving death metal hot on its heels: I’ve seen the phrase NWOSDM – “New Wave of Old School Death Metal” – used. Come on now. The prevalence of hyper-labeling is almost funny at this point.
As entries in the “Genres” section of our collective iTunes keep multiplying like hungry Tribbles, bands find more and more ways to build upon metal’s grimy roots, creating scores of spectacular (or just spectacularly crappy) sounds. The once dark palette has filled with splashes of color. Heavy metal will always be the law, but its bastard children continue to spread the disease far and wide.
When all’s said and done, microgenres can be useful, if sometimes distasteful – a necessary and generally harmless sort of evil. That’s the basic premise behind this new series. For the next few months, we’ll be tackling a number of our favorite itsy-bitsy scenes and no-but-what-IS-it subgenres, which will hopefully inspire plenty of thought, discussion, and squabbling over semantics. Get ready to rage.
. . .
Micro sub genres are the equivalent of hipsters: “knew it all before you heard it” = cooler than you. Deserve my middle finger up where it don’t shine.
Yep. That’s Grim Kim for you. She is from Brooklyn, after all.
No, I’m not. I’ve lived here for less than a year. I’m from the Pine Barrens.
That was an attempt at being tongue-in-cheek anyway. Ha ha?
I had to Google Pine Barrens. It looks like a Drudkh album cover. It’s all coming together now.
^ Geeking out and wanting to categorize things (like a Biologist would) doesn’t make you a hipster.
I think it’s really a question of utility at this point. When we first discussed this internally, I kept coming back to the term “black metal,” whose descriptive value is basically zero. Yes, it’s (usually) not difficult to differentiate between black metal and death metal (assuming some familiarity with both genres to begin with), but the gap between, say, Watain and Wolves in the Throne Room is so vast that to categorize both bands together does a disservice to the bands, the category and the listener.
In terms of how it functions Black Metal works much more like Punk does. The difference in sound between anything that can be called Punk is vast (speaking of sub-sub-sub-genres) and I think it’s the same for Black Metal. The reason for this is Punk and Black Metal are as much about defining a attitude and philosophy as they are about anything sonic. For example lets pull the flip side of that: In Death Metal you could be talking about politics, horror movie scenes, satan or cute puppies, but if you’ve got some sort of growl vocals and there’s some palm muted riffing going on then bam: Death Metal.
I don’t even think there’s anything resembling a singular attitude or philosophy in black metal at this point. Back when he was the architect of this stuff, Euronymous said, “Black metal has nothing to do with the music itself…it’s the LYRICS, and they must be SATANIC. If not, it is NOT black metal… If a band cultivates death and worships Satan, it’s black metal.”
In a recent Decibel interview, Wrest of Leviathan echoed this sentiment, suggesting that his own work should not be considered black metal, and saying outright that WITTR are not black metal.
But both Leviathan and WITTR are generally considered black metal, right? Heck, Burzum’s best albums are more concerned with Wotan than Satan (in fact, Satan would have no place in Burzum’s work or worldview). All told, Satan seems to be a minimal presence in what we call “black metal” today. So what is that attitude and philosophy, and who defines it?
Romanticism (of the German artistic sort) is the underlying theme you can pretty much find in all Black Metal. That includes viewing satan as a liberating hero, the concerns for nature/the wild, connections to romantic era composers (Beethoven to Wagner to finally Mahler), Nietzsche and Gothic Horror. Metal/Punk + 18-19th century Romanticism = Black Metal. Watain, Leviathan, Immortal & Wolves in the Throne Room all fit into it, only exception is Liturgy because they’re not Black Metal.
I think that’s a reasonable synopsis of black metal’s primary underlying themes, although it’s flexible enough to contain multitudes, and still inflexible enough to be fallible: consider (for example, off the top of my head) albums like Marduk’s Panzer Division Marduk or Vreid’s Milorg, both of which are widely considered “black metal” yet focus tightly on WWII as subject matter. More annoying still are the countless bands whose music includes one or more of themes you’ve listed but are plainly NOT black metal (say, Ghost or Deicide or something). The more we examine the evidence, the more we’re kind of left with the old Potter Stewart line on pornography: I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.
My initial point, though, was not so much made to call for a definition of black metal as it was to assert the need for subcategories within black metal, just as a practical matter. If you tell me, “[X] is the best black metal album I’ve heard in years,” it’s vague enough to mean exactly nothing: not only does the genre tag have zero descriptive value, but that phrasing gives no context or clarity to the field against which [X] is being compared, because even if we agree on the primary underlying themes, the world of black metal is far too vast for any single point on the spectrum to somehow be reflective of the spectrum as a whole.
Also, to Liturgy’s credit (I guess): As far as I can tell, they recognized early on that they would not be considered a genuine “black metal” band and hence self-categorized as “transcendental black metal,” preemptively deflating skepticism about their sincerity and/or where they should be filed (or so they hoped…).
Oh, I certainly wasn’t arguing that to label sub-genres within Black Metal is wrong. Far from, I find it useful enough, I just think there is a certain river that runs through all of it. As for Ghost and Deicide, while they share the theme/philosophy (to whatever extent) they’re very much musically defined by other genres (Heavy/Classic Metal and Death Metal). And in relation to this topic anything that touches upon the themes of Black Metal, but wouldn’t get called Black Metal itself seems to get tagged with Blackened “x” (Thrash, Death, Doom, etc.).
I think the sub-genre descriptions are really intended more for the derivative bands than they are for the trailblazers. For instance, as much as I hate the term “djent”, if a band cribs a substantial portion of their style from Meshuggah I’d rather someone recommend them to me using the accepted sub-genre “djent” than to go into a lengthy description encompassing every aspect of their sound… that may be appropriate in a written review but in casual conversation we tend to look for whatever shorthand we have available.
In fact, thought I wholeheartedly agree that we – the royal “we”, we as a subculture – go way too far in our subdivisions upon subdivisions, I’m not sure it’s accurate to ascribe that to hipster motivations or an impetus to try to “paint the artist into a box”. Isn’t it equally possible that people coin sub-sub-sub-genre (microgenres as you call them) appellations for the exact opposite reason: that maybe they’re trying to actually AVOID painting the artist into a box by just labeling them something broad or generic like “black metal”, so they start inventing artificial, more specific distinctions like “cascadian black metal” in an attempt to honor the artists by acknowledging their break from tradition?
At any rate, as someone hinted upthread, taxonomy is not by any means a music-specific pursuit… it’s utilized to some degree in nearly every discipline. Nor do I think it actually limit musicians in any real life sense; the very existence of boundary-pushing bands like Watain and WitTR attest to that. In fact, considering the new microgenres by nature are not coined until the material they describe already exists, it doesn’t seem particularly defensible to argue against genre labels as a whole on the basis that they limit perceptions or the art itself. Once that’s been established you’re really down to specifics, not principle.
I remember an online discussion (on a forum dedicated to comics – their music thread may go out of hand sometimes)in which some forumite made an interesting statement: he felt that the Metal genre subdivised itself in its various “microgenres” as he was getting more and more disconnected from the other popular music genres.
I’m not exactly sure it was 100% true (one could tell that it’s popular music which is getting disconnected from all other music genres), but it may be something to investigate: is the blooming of the various microgenres a syndrome of self-centering (maybe elitism?) or the sole evolution of the genre?
After all, Jazz also tends to evolve into microgenres: some people make the difference between Jazz-Rock and Fusion, and they also split Free Jazz from the “New Thing” from Improvised music from Free Funk from No Wave from… No to talk about the “Third Stream”, Hard Bop, etc…
Anyway, maybe we should also consider the possible utilisation of specific nametag as a commercial argument: “Hey, our death-metal bands are different! They are… Huh, “Necroblasting Death Metal” bands, please!”
Some tags just sound like this to me: “New Wave of Old School Death Metal”? Seriously? Some guys just love oxymorons (and you can’t have oxymorons without morons)…
I rememeber reading somewhere that the explosion of different metal genres in the 80s was a sort of marketing thing that bands did to differentiate themselves from one another. Musically there wasn’t a huge amount of difference between (at that time) thrash metal bands, speed metal bands, black metal bands (in the old, pre-1990s sense), but there was a utility in touting yourself to be something new and different from the other bands playing similar things.
The corollary of this would be to explore the way that microgenres stem from the bands/musicians and/or from the fans/listeners/writers.
… or, in some cases, by the record companies.
I used to work at a record store, we used to lump all metal, punk, and hardcore into one section, “agressive.” We found that everyone who bought those genres 1. didn’t care and 2. didn’t stick to one sub-genre. It also made it easy to shelve – Earth Crisis, Emperor, and Extreme Noise Terror all went in the same section.
Personally, I used to use broad genre tags for my music collection; Darkthrone, Napalm Death, and Coffins all getting tagged “Metal” for instance. Recently I’ve started using more narrow tags – Black Metal, Death Metal, Doom, etc… but these might be too broad now. Bands like Coffins or Encoffination, are they Death Metal? Doom? no… they’re Death/Doom… What about bands like Doom? Victims? Skitsystem? Are they Crust? D-Beat?
It’s funny, because in every other aspect of my life, I’m trying to simplify things.
I once tried to organize my music collection into various genres/subgenres/etc. Worst. Idea. Ever. Went back to good ol’ alphabetical after maybe a week. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with, and the arguments it will undoubtedly spark amongst us metal nerds.
I agree that it ends up getting overly complicated, but if anything the superfluous never ending genre names go to indicate that metal is constantly evolving, morphing and expanding in a way that other types of music aren’t – or at least, not at the same rate and without so many fusions and hybrids. Rather than bemoan it, I think this is something to be celebrated. The music is moving faster than the nomenclature.
This is going to be a fun series. It does get on one’s nerves but we all do it.
When recommending a new band to each other, my friends and I will often joke, “Oh, you know, they’re like Avant-Garde Blackened Power Sludge Metal with Doom influences and a hint of Crust” or “They kind of fall into the whole Industrial Post-Grind Jazz with a sprinkling of Viking/Folk Metal category.” All joking aside, the human brain naturally categorizes seemingly every aspect of life, which serves as a sort of filing system for the mind. Does that justify the existence of Djent…? I hope not…
I find the taxonomy around metal pretty fascinating. I wonder how much the genre labels helped (some) bands to develop their own sound — “Hey, let’s push it a little to another direction, we don’t wanna be labeled as Vanilla Generic Metal.” Waiting for the series!
That said, I’d give my left ear to never hear/read the word “djent” again.
AMEN!! When I purchased Meshuggah’s Destroy Erase Improve on CD when it came out, it had a sticker that said something like “Groove-oriented metal” or something. Now people are asking if the forthcoming Meshuggah album is already ruined by the legions of “Djent” bands that straight up utterly copied Meshuggah and have flooded the marketplace with “Metal” that they looped and cut and pasted in their sweatpants at their USB interface and computer.
All that to say that I hate the word Djent. It makes a nice, accurate sound when you say it, but are we going to start sub-categorizing all new genres with their onomatopoeia equivalent?
I have no problem with labeling things myself, but I understand why the musician him/herself might get angry. I saw an interview with the guitarist/singer from Castevet and he spoke about the tendency for people to label the band as hardcore or post-hardcore. He wasn’t angry about having that label but argued against it. For the average listener/blogger/fan/whatever it’s necessary, especially when trying to explain metal (sub)genres to a non-metal listener. I youtubed a bunch of bands recently attempting to do this for someone and they were confused. This person seemed to understand less after the exercise than before.
To a certain degree diffentiation is just sensible – when your iTunes library passes a certain size, catalogueing via genres is the best way to go. But it does offer many a headache: a) if you want to keep it simple yet specific, bands like Goatwhore become an obstacle, is it Black or Death Metal? Or blackened Thrash? Do I want to create a new genre that will only contain one band for a while?
And woe onto the bands that change genre altogether – a good reason not to buy the new Opeth
I understand the frustration with bands not wanting to be pigeon-holed into a sub-genre, but (and I’ve mentioned this on another thread) I find it extremely whiney when bands complain about it.
We have far passed the point of ridiculousness when it comes to naming these sub-genres. I would argue though, that too many sub-genres is far better than not enough sub-genres. To limit the terms we can use to describe music and convey ideas about that music is to limit the depth of discussion on blogs such as these, as well as musical discussion in general. The informed listener will take a band described as “funeral doom” for example, and give that band a chance despite any negative connotations that label may have for them. The informed listener takes these labels for what they’re worth, and realizes the limitations of our language, which is incompatible with the way in which music speaks to us.
There will never be a way to give a 100% accurate verbal description of how a band sounds that everyone can agree with, and this is a good thing. Check it out for yourself, and decide for yourself.
“The informed listener takes these labels for what they’re worth, and realizes the limitations of our language, which is incompatible with the way in which music speaks to us.”
Winner.
I don’t need a sub genre to tell me that Liturgy suck….
+1
+1
Transcendental +1
It’s funny how mad people get about this stuff.
“Can’t we just call it metal? In my day, we listened to everything: Pantera, Slipknot, Lamb of God, Evanescence. Now it’s all christmas reggae grind and ambient tech doom. Stupid hipsters!”
One of my favorites is Eight Hands for Kali, who play Buddhist War Doom.
I’m praying for a full length discussion of goregrind vs pornogrind, with gratuitous examples of both.
I think that has more to do with lyrics than anything else…
I’d love to see a stab at a lengthy dissertation on the dichotomy, though… To stretch that article to 1000 words you’d have to be cruel, unusual, and more than a little masochistic.
Just you wait.
I’m waiting for somebody to tell me just what deathgrind is. A musical mix of death and grind? Grind with death metal lyrics? (wouldn’t that be goregrind?) Is it death metal with gore lyrics?
Kim, I can’t wait for you to tackle the difference betweeen speed metal, US power metal, true metal, traditional metal, 80s metal, and Euro power metal, all of which gets crammed under ‘power metal.’ If you are so much as one iota wrong (i.e. you disagree with me) I will throw an iTantrum.
I’d call Deathgrind: Terrorizer, Brutal Truth, some Napalm Death albums, Exhumed, Cattle Decapitation and a few others. Also probably Carcass’ Symphonies of Sickness (but only that album really).
The new Sulaco is supposed to be deathgrind (despite the ’90s post-hardcore vibe on certain songs?); it’s a weird distinction. Maruta maybe?
In my mind deathgrind equals grind I can actually listen to.
“In my mind deathgrind equals grind I can actually listen to.”
+1
I consider BT and terrorizer to be mostly grind and exhumed, death metal. But I think we have the same working definition, which is a musical mix of death and grind.
Problem is that I’ve heard of bands that are sometimes called goregrind and other times deathgrind. Pedantry, thy face is heavy metal fandom.
It’s a double edged sword, on the one hand we all need reference points. If I read a review and/or a friend says to me about a band ‘they kind of sound like Agalloch a little bit’ i’m intrigued and will probably check said artist out at least. If someone says ‘well they kinda sound like As I Lay Dying’ probably not. nothing against them, just not my thing.
but on the other hand, it’s really all just ‘heavy music.’ I remember playing for my Grandmother a few years ago Soundgarden ‘Outshined’ and an Iron Maiden video, and asked her if she heard anything different. Obviously she didn’t like either, but to her it sounded and looked the same, guys with long hair and high-pitched vocals making a racket!
Things you don’t enjoy always sound more alike than things you actually do enjoy.
To throw everyone for a loop, here you go:
http://rateyourmusic.com/rgenre/
Every genre of music under the sun!
this is retarded.
call it whatever the fuck you want, just include some kind of stream and people will figure it out for themselves. go back to college, hipsters.
RAWR, i hate school!
Grrrrrr! CLASS WAR!
Haven’t we already had this discussion? More than once. Boring!!!
I liked that Idea of using untraditioal music classifications, like mattack’s “Agressive” shelf.
During my exploration of Hardcore from its inception to current state, though I could tell sonically and state in a timeline the seperations, I had a hard time classifying them in my media player(or to other people). It got harder as it branched off further to stuff like “metallic hardcore” and “chaotic hardcore”; even now I couldn’t tell you what those tags mean.
I ended up seperating them in my player as “Hardcore: Bust” and “Hardcore: Slash” that put things like Black Flag, Terror, Converge, Cave In and everything in between into an immediate frame of reference to what I was looking for.
In general, I find genres kind of ridiculous — like THKD, I’ve never been able to separate out my music collection into genres. But I find genres and subgenres very useful when trying to describe a band to someone, or recommend a band — or when a band is being recommended to ME, especially. You can say they sound like X, Y and Z bands, but if you haven’t heard those bands, that doesn’t get you any closer to understanding the band your friend is recommending. If your friend describes them in terms of genre/subgenre “flavors,” then that helps get you closer.
Plus, as you say, there’s a certain nerd factor. It’s like semantics. But with sounds!
I think a good example of a modern death grind band would be Cephalic Carnage , fundamentally it is death metal; double bass and blasterbatory rhythms ( lol ) , tremelo picking , atonality , dissonance and dissonant chord progressions paired with the sometimes maniacal and ridiculous lyrics , 30 second long songs that are some sort of introduction to slightly longer songs that you would find in grindcore . At that makes sense to me n junk
Defining a musical genre has nothing at all to do with lyrics or attitude. Music is music, and can only be defined based on its musical characteristics. A while back I attempted to define metal (link), and I pointed out that Sabbath has more in common with your average hard rock band than it does with, say, Cephalic Carnage. But the reason Cephalic Carnage is considered metal is based on its sound as viewed from a historical perspective, i.e., that band’s sound grew out of another sound that was considered metal, which was considered metal because it too grew out of another sound that was considered metal.
So, in essence, that’s what WITTR and Deathspell Omega have in common: A historical, sonic connection to a musical tradition known as black metal.
Few people seem to grasp this, but it’s really how most musical genres are defined, and it’s how they all should be defined. Black metal, for instance, is said to be essentially a form of rock music. But if history had been different, that wouldn’t necessarily be the case. There’s no reason the same thing couldn’t have grown out of classical music. (The term “classical music” itself has problems, because it’s defined in part based on when it was created. Too early or too late, and the “experts” don’t consider it classical, even though anyone hearing it would consider it as such.)
Now, the reason it should be this way is because it’s the only way to understand the genre tag and to make any use of it. Any other method of genre classification involves revision, but this way happens naturally. The historical connections, or genre lineage, grow over time. At one point someone said, “Black Sabbath is metal”, then “Motorhead is metal,” then “Venom is metal”, then “Bathory is metal”, then “Darkthrone is metal”. You put it in a box and make a connection that’s useful because people have an understanding of what the term means, an understanding that grows over time. But if Darkthrone had come around at the same time as Sabbath, they never would have been considered to be the same thing.
In the article I linked (link again) I also included a genre “family tree” that illustrates how this happens.
Kim Kennedy, let’s get ready to rage:
http://www.ioffer.com/i/kennedy-alternative-nation-mtv-1995-rob-zombie-beck-182325867
Oops, it looks like I screwed up on the first link and just sent you to my main site. Here is the article in question.
Also, maybe I can help somebody with their iTunes library. If you already have a method, far be it from me to tell you to do it differently. But here’s how I do my genres. I try to include as many as possible. E.g., Behemoth is under “blackened death metal”, Gloria Morti under “melodic blackened death metal”, and At the Gates under “melodic death metal”. Instead of using the iTunes genre selection tools, I set up various smart playlists that pick up on certain words or word parts in the genre tag. For instance, I have a death metal playlist that will pick up all three of these bands, a melodic death metal playlist that will pick up the latter two, and a blackened death metal playlist that will pick up the first two. I find this useful for a lot of reasons, mostly for my writing but also for my listening habits. The only thing iTunes is missing that I wish it would have is some kind of geographic tagging mechanism, although I have considered using some other unused area for that.
I use the “grouping” category to note a band’s geography, although it’s not what iTunes apparently intended it for. It works well enough for me and it’s all I’ve got.
I like your smart playlist idea too. I really don’t use them but I do have my genres labeled in a similar way to yours. “Melodic Black/Death Metal” or “Sludge Metal/Post-Hardcore”, etc.
I’ve considered that one. I have no idea what it was actually intended for, but it seems to make sense. But then I consider the daunting task of going in and adding that information to everything in my library . . . and how deep do I go? Do I just add the country? Do I also want to add regions (Europe, Scandinavia, Nordic Countries, Middle East) or do I organize that through the use of smart playlists? For US bands, do I add the state? Do I add a significant city?
So, for all those problems, I might never get around to doing it.
Blackened doom.
Hey, you’re right, that’s really easy!
Hey, I am a big fan of the Goat Metal sound and aesthetic – hoods, bullet belts, army boots, camo pants, War Paint (basically Corpse Paint w/out the white part…)and extensive use of Chris Moyen artwork! Black Witchery, Proclamation, Necroholocaust, Bestial Warlust fit the bill … as well as most of the bands playing at Nuclear War Now in Berlin!!!
I categorize my music (in iTunes at least, that’s about the only place it matters) to the extent that I find it necessary. I used to have all of my metal under “Metal”, until I noticed that going from Iron Maiden to Mayhem to Winter to Meshuggah to Morbid Angel was sort of a jarring listening experience. So I divided it up into metal, black metal, death metal, and doom metal, and if I want further differentiation, I just create specific playlists. I feel like if I go any more specific than that, I’m going to end up spending more time adjudicating genres than I am actually listening to music.
This is exactly how I classify my iTunes library. Sub-genres like post-(rock, metal, hardcore all separate), doom, death, black, grindcore, metalcore, folk and melodic death are all labeled, but I don’t go any deeper than that. If a band blends a few genres to where the distinction is negligible, I just go with the one I think they more closely lean towards. Hence, Coffins are in death metal because they display an Autopsy influence, even though there is a pronounced doom element as well. All death doom (the Peaceville Three and such) are in doom because there’s not as much death in their sound. I do reserve a general “metal” category for bands who either blend too many genres to accurately file under one sub-genre (Tombs, Meshuggah, the Georgian bands) or traditional metal bands like Sabbath, Maiden or even Hammers of Misfortune. It’s sort of confusing to others but I know where to find what I need when I need it.
Anyone heard of “cascadian black metal”…?
Sometimes I can barely tell an absolutely killer coprogrind album from a lackluster jizzgrind album these days…
You haven’t lived until you’ve checked out the newest doodoogrind album from We Are The Imperators Of The Dawning Race.