A Bit On Metal

Quite a lot on here about iron but there is another form of metal that is dear to my heart, the musical sort.

There is a certain irony to my musical taste. Yes the pun was intentional, it was lousy but I'm not a comedian. I don't like profanity and spend my life trying to be a decent pacifist who is in control of his aggression. So the fact that most of my preferred music is blatantly abusive profanity slamming the system we live in and the general ignorance of people who don't realise how we are abused by so many things would appear to be in direct conflict with this.

There is a lot of infighting in metal which I don't get. We are a niche group anyway, why separate within ourselves? People will post to tell people they hate a given song or band and they want to listen to someone else instead. Why they stuck around listening to it long enough to say so rather than going elsewhere I don't know. It's the same when people write in to complain about a TV show they watched start to finish, as if there is only one channel. I am well out of touch with music and have been scoring through YouTube to find stuff I enjoy. In doing so I have found lots of stuff I don't, guess what I left these to the people who do and moved on.

One band I have found that really tick my boxes is Disturbed, the name says it all. Vocals are heavy with gravelled edge but not the full on growl of death metal, the guitars are just heavy and the drumming is awesome. The lyrics are brilliant, not pleasant, but most of my music isn't, but thought inspiring in the way only nasty stuff can be on occasions. The thing I am finding with these guys is the way they have been able to play at the fast pace I prefer and slower paces without me stopping enjoying it. Normally I find slow metal horrible, the feel of heavier music brings out the accelerated hyper in me allowing me to stop trying to slow myself down for a while, so when this is slow it aggravates me by not keeping up.
The lead singer sang with another band Deviant and though I still liked his vocals the guitars were lighter and I didn't like it nearly as much.

One relatively new genre of music is symphonic metal, why it took so long to arrive I don't know, most metalheads love powerful classical music so this seemed a really natural step for me. Many of them use female vocalists or in the case of Epica and a few others female symphonic and male death metal voice, which is a brilliant combination. I haven't encountered many women who could carry off metal, most just never had the power, but recently I have heard a few really good examples, one being in the iron maidens, an iron maiden cover obviously. To be able to cover Bruce Dickinson takes serious training, the guys vocal range was incredible and she does it better than anyone I have ever heard. The only reason I don't listen to them more is because I can listen to the actual tracks by iron maiden when that is the pace I want.

Old vs. new metal. Seriously annoying debate. I like a lot of the newer stuff but without the old to inspire them they would be nothing. The reason I prefer the newer stuff is predominantly pace. Older metal groups were playing to fans who will not have been used to hearing seriously fast music. In order for them to be remotely successful they had to play what people could handle, they were also inspired by music from other genres because metal was brand new, so the inspiration was from slower music. Now we have bands standing on the shoulders of these giants taking what they did to the next level in various ways while still keeping to the fundamental principles.

Topics. The most common topics in my metal are pointing out the flaws in society, leadership, war and showing ignorance as the harmful thing it generally is. This isn't done calmly, which makes people think it is about encouraging violence even though it is just showing why serious pacifists get so angry. One of the songs that brought this to my mind was finding out that the UK Christmas No.1 was rage against the machine's killin' in the name. A song showing disgust at the way people are sent to kill for the profit and megalomania of the few. One part I found strange with this was the declaration that it was inappropriate for Christmas, after all how could a group of people with one leading voice getting angry and speaking out against the establishment in the name of peace be relevant to a Christian festival. Surely Jesus never got angry at the governing powers and the violent repression going on around him. Maybe they should have been wearing fake white beards, that would have made them relevant.
Religion or inspiration from the scriptures are very common, though rarely viewed in a positive light. Personally I don't see this as an issue and most with strong faith don't either. One of my old training partners was a Christian who loved metal and would happily sing along with the lyrics slamming parts of the bible or decrying the way the faith of many is abused. As far as he was concerned if you can't handle your faith being challenged you don't really have any.
Love songs. There are a few, if somewhat less than there are lust songs. Most of them are about sticking with it and working together as a couple or family, which is more realistic, because fairy tale happily ever after is just that a fairy tale, good relationships take constant work, over time this becomes so much part of your life you don't realise it but it's still there.

If you don't like metal because of the sound, fair play, most don't. If it's the content you struggle with you may just need to find a different band. There is metal about virtually everything, legends, violence, politics, etc.