This is probably the dumbest series of statements I've ever seen on this forum. Way to defeat your own logic!

At least I've finally got a new sig now.

I'd hate to have him on my side for anything. XD

"Here's my defiant statement!" "What's the point of that defiant statement?" "Exactly!"

Your words about Ultimate Sin mirror mine almost exactly but I have to disagree with regarding Bark At the Moon. It definitely is Ozzy's most varied album but that ambitious variety works so well because unlike any other time in his solo career, Ozzy is at the very top of his game.

I maintain that with Jake E. Lee and Daisley composing the music, there was a greater emphasis placed on speed. Even when the songs were not of a breakneck nature there was still so much movement within them. Jake was, imo, superior to Randy at including color within the riffs because of the more inherent energy they contained. During Randy's tenure the band could do no wrong with the tempo at eleven, but anytime they slowed the speed or did a ballad - and Ozzy's vocal melodies were forced to be stretched over entire musical measures - everything feels so flatfooted and bland. The music Jake & Bob made was also noteworthy when playing at a rapid fire pace but they did the impossible by finding a perfect ground for Ozzy's vocal melodies during those slow stompers and ballads. Compare the drek of Goodbye To Romance, Tonight or You Can't Kill Rock and Roll - or Fire In the Sky, Road to Nowhere or See You On the Other Side for future embarrassments - with the luscious and poignant effort on You're No Different or Killer Of Giants. Ozzy sounds like a vocal God, his voice soaring from the top of a mountain, with a clarity rarely shown before and almost never again afterward.Never does have a great intro but its riff during the refrain is particurally haunting. The Ultimate Sin is an absolutely sleazy riff-fest, with the criminally underrated Fool Like You and Secret Loser.The Ultimate Sin is only not remastered because they would have to pay extra royalties to Phil Soussan since he wrote most of Shot In the Dark.

"Killer of Giants" is a good song, and I do agree that Ozzy's vocals on the Jake albums are the best he's had since Sabotage, probably. Personally, I'm not a fan of "You're No Different", but I do agree that it's a step in the right direction from "Goodbye to Romance". I respect that there's a lot of variety on Bark at the Moon, and I've given that album a number of chances, but I feel like the songs weren't quite there. For example, and I don't always agree with Ultraboris, but I think he was right when he said that "Centre of Eternity" is let down by a pretty lousy chorus. It's a song that is so frustratingly close to being great, but falls short of it, at least for me it does. I wouldn't go so far as to say that The Ultimate Sin is a perfect album, but I do feel like Jake was a lot more comfortable in the band and had spread his wings by that point. It's a shame that he got replaced just when he found his voice in the band.

“Tonight” and “You Can’t Kill Rock n Roll” are among my fav tracks on “Diary” and what propel it over the top, imo.
Stellar tracks.

Can't say I'm the biggest fan of You Can't Kill Rock and Roll, but Tonight is one of my favourite Ozzy ballads. I like the rest of the 'dreck' and 'embarrassments' from that post as well.

"Little Dolls" is the only song on Diary that I'd not consider "classic". Such a killer album.

Gotta admit I wasn't lookin where I was going on that one.

But I also get really annoyed when no one gives Ozzy his due when it comes to trad metal. Glam metal? GTFO with that.

Just that one song. Though I do agree it has more going on than just that.

I did like Diary of a Madman and No Rest for the Wicked quite a bit when going through some of the early albums, let's just agree to call it essential heavy metal rather than anything else as that seems to be the most accurate descriptor.

Whomever said that Ultimate Sin is the best Ozzy solo album was correct.

Ultimate Sin is amazing, but my favorite is No More Tears. Ozzy's solo career run from Blizzard of Ozz to No More Teats is flawless in my opinion.

Agreed. I think US metal

- has fewer 70s hardrock, folk or blues influences than metal of the NWoBHM variety and fewer overt influences from classical music than European power metal,
- is the intermediate stage between metal of the NWoBHM variety and thrash metal and/or progressive metal,
- often comes with a nasal and high-pitched singer who vaguely resembles Geoff Tate (optional, not obligatory, but very frequent); I don't know but maybe there's even more twang (the country vocal technique) or more head voice (or some other technique) involved than in other metal singing styles.

I think discussions like these somehow confirm that the Archives site lacks intersubjective explanations of the metal subgenres. If a band is labelled as "thrash", "death metal" or "post-black metal", readers might want to know what those labels are supposed to mean.

Recently, Bruce Dickinson revealed his dislike for classifications and turned out to be the shaggy guy (the 'I don't differentiate between crime fiction, steampunk and epic literature. Categorically' guy) who walks into a bookstore and says: "Can you recommend me a book I like?"

'It's all just rock 'n' roll, and I like it.' Yeah, ok, but the fewer the categories the more impossible it becomes to think and talk about music. Categories are useful means of communication.

I really think that Bruce is a legend of heavy metal, but I seriously doubt that he even listens to metal nowadays, he strikes me as a very serious, correct and educated guy, kind of like a college professor or a commercial air pilot, not exactly the kind of guy that I expect to see in a metal show of any kind.

I love Bruce, but I couldn't give less of a shit of what his opinions about modern metal are, he must listen to Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple and say stuff like "70s rock was the best era of music". Shut up boomer, thanks for Iron Maiden but we have walked a long road since Maiden happened.

Well it's good to be able to talk about categories to delve deeper into what something is, but at the same time I get bored instantly if the first thing to say about a band I never heard of is "it sounds like this other band" or some such thing. I'd rather hear what makes something unique on its own.

Some people get so far in the weeds with the classifications, too, that it almost seems like they start dismissing things outright, talking more about the labels and where things fit than the actual substance or character of the music. Fine if that's what you want to do, but talking about stuff like "is Mercyful Fate black metal" tends to get so binary in the way the discussion is held here, without much nuance.

Like half the time somebody says some random album was ruined by outside influences or some weird thing that separates it from the norm, that's always the best part to me.

Agreed. I remember listening to an interview with Chuck Schuldiner, in which the guy said something along the lines of 'categories suck, because some people might have negative associations with a certain genres and therefore don't want to check something out''.

Now imagine a world in which metal was simply called metal and nothing else.

Who knows what he listens to now, but in the late 90s, he was a vocal supporter of extreme metal. I vividly recall interviews where he was heaping praise on Cradle Of Filth. A far cry from Hendrix, to be sure.
(As an aside, around the same time, Rob Halford was also a vocal supporter of extreme metal, specifically Emperor.)

Delightfully many correct opinions about The Ultimate Sin in this thread.

I think it's probably something of a bell curve. On one far end you've got people who are impossible to talk to because "all heavy music is metal" and that's the exact approach my grandmother takes towards music. On the other far end if you've got people who split hairs so finely they're in danger of nuclear fission as if anybody other than giganerds who somehow inverted their Heirarchy of Needs to put "feeling special" over "hygiene" gives a fuck about the differences between death/thrash and thrash/death.

I give goofy little genre descriptors to bands/albums in my head that I find granularly useful (I mentally call albums like The Black Album and Countdown to Extinction "speed rock", I differentiate tech death by "Nileist" (Hour of Penance, Hideous Divinity) and "Weedlecore" (Rings of Saturn, Brain Drill), the heavy prog metal bands out of Northern Europe are "chugprog" (Pagan's Mind, Morgana Lefay) and if they chug even harder they become "white collar groove metal" (Nevermore), you've got "melodeath" (In Flames, Soilwork), "melodic death metal" (At the Gates, Black Dahlia), "Bodomites" (Norther, Bodom ofc), "sad melodeath" (Insomnium, Be'lakor), and "mellowdeath" (Amorphis, Sentenced (I'm told this is just some form of gothic metal at times but idgaf)), et cetera ad infinitum) but the thing is that I keep those inside for myself and don't try to spread them or insist other people use these classification because I know they're dumb as hell and only make sense to me because my brain is spaghetti.

So, personally, I think USPM is useful simply because it's been so proliferated here as to have some pretty defined characteristics, but I also think it says something that simply calling it "USPM" is too broad to be meaningful while introducing even one split ("white collar/blue collar") makes it so hyperspecific that it becomes meaningless in the opposite direction. Kinda implies that it's a worthless dork term after all.

I've been awake for twenty minutes and this post has too many god damned (parentheses) and "quotation marks".

One thing I actually do agree with regarding the "no categorization" thing is that it really is easy to enjoy most different subgenera of metal if you actually listen to it a lot. I've been in a real mood for just nothing but good riffs lately and been cycling between Demolition Hammer, old Blind Guardian and Scanner, Bolt Thrower, Ares Kingdom and Isen Torr for weeks now - it's all just good stuff and it never makes sense to me when people are just not into broad swathes of it. But oh well.

I’m pretty guilty of making up goofball categorizations like this too. I like to think it can give certain bands and albums more distinct personalities and it amuses me when friends start picking up whatever term I use for something that amuses them, but I think there’s a difference between playing with personal references and trying to make them “a thing.” Cue all the old UltraBoris-core terms like whiffle thrash…

Motley Crue first album is uspm?

Hmmm

I don't see an issue with what Dickenson was talking about in that article. Nothing "boomer" about that POV, if anything its a rejection of the "this is not metal despite it being full of elements of metal!!!!111!" arguments you get on sites like this. And the hyper nit picky genres are mostly stupid to me. Listening to people categorize death metal these days is just goofy.

To him music either moves him or it doesn't and he really doesn't care about what the genre label is, which seems more about having to be "true" to a genre or to metal or anything.

This sounds worthwhile although I've no idea what it means.

Why do you think that one split makes the term so "hyperspecific that it becomes meaningless"? I really don't get that.

Do subdivisions such as "Bay Area thrash", "East Coast thrash" or "German thrash" make the term "thrash" meaningless? If I'm not mistaken, the basic terms "heavy metal", "thrash", "speed", "power"; "death", "black" and so on were invented (or, at least, applied) by music journos whose job it was to talk about music. As long as you know what the terms are supposed to mean, they can't be meaningless, can they?

In all fairness, liking a well written crime fiction book doesn't necessarily mean you're going to like a shitty crime fiction book, or even a good crime book that just doesn't resonate with you the way the first one did. No matter what you ask for you're not guaranteed to find something you like.
Classifications have utility, but it's a limited utility that doesn't really justify monstrous linguistic constructions like "white collar USPM" and "technical blackened death metal".

I've seen online debates about when Maiden "stopped being NWOBHM." (The logic of this debate being that since NWOBHM was an early 80s music scene, at some point Maiden outgrew the term.) Don't tell me discussions like that actually help anyone appreciate or find music. That's just obsession with labels.

I think that Bruce said that because in his time there weren't any metal genres, he along with the rest of the musicians of the NWOBHM kind of invented metal as a whole. But if you guys said that he liked some extreme metal bands I believe you. He just didn't strike me as a guy who would listen to a whole lot of metal, much less the kind of extreme music we daily discuss here.

Genre tags in music are just shorthand for musical conventions. If I walk into a book store and head for the crime fiction or historical section all it means is that I'm interested in looking for some new reading material that dabbles in some specific tropes and storytelling devices. There is no guarantee I will like whatever book I pick up but there's probably a better chance of that happening than if I were to pick up some random romance novel, when I have no real interest in or liking for those type of stories.

Similarly, I could try listening to every noise or power electronics album in existence but the chances of me liking anything from those genres are so close to 0 that it's not worth my time doing so. It would be more productive for me to listen to music that I'm actually predisposed to like. Some people can get into death metal after listening to enough bands but others can't get over the harsh vocals or the instrumentation no matter how many times they try, and classifying everything under metal will not help that. It will, however, make it harder for them to find music that they do like within the genre.

That's just where the broader appreciation Bruce is talking about comes in though, which I agree with to some extent in my personal tastes anyway... I think it can be limiting to think of things in terms of rigid tropes or of checking down a list of things you have to have or else you won't like it. I like to be open to everything at least a little.

My point was you can't even communicate if you avoid genre terms or comparable categories. (Not to mention that literary scholars, musicologists and everyone else involved in the description of the arts could pack in.)



Why not? If there are a significant number of bands or artists who produce music that sounds fairly similar, you have a genre or a subgenre. A genre or subgenre needs a name. However, I don't know whether "white collar" and "technical blackened" indicate a fixed subsubgenre or are only used as loose bonus attributes that are supposed to help the readers to see which corner of the subgenre they're currently looking at. If the established terms are too flowery or too complicated – let's invent some new ones and let's see if they stick.

So like, okay, what IS USPM exactly?

"Bands from x region/scene that utilize y tropes and the bands that take influence from said scene"

Okay, cool, makes total sense. But Omen and Crimson Glory sound wildly different.

"Well that's because Omen is blue collar and Crimson Glory is white collar"

Ah okay, what about the hundreds of bands in between those two extremes?

"*400+ page thread in the rec forum*"

Classifications are fine and useful but I'm sorry, the intense scrutiny this one tiny short lived scene with such a dinky impact compared to the early trad/thrash/death/black/prog/grind/whatever scenes tends to get from online nerds like us is very, very funny to me.

The only dumbass fake genre I'll defend til my dying breath is "long thrash". The impact of AJFA and how it ruined so many bands that were never equipped to write songs like that (Znowhite becoming Cyclone Temple, Dark Angel abandoning all of their strengths on Time Does Not Heal, even the generally good ones like Persistence of Time) absolutely deserves to be named, cataloged, and immortalized.

"Long thrash", hahaha! I know exactly what you mean. However, some thrash metal bands still pull off longer tracks.

Does USPM really get that much attention? I feel like most of what I say about it is me talking into an echo chamber. And a lot of the stuff I talk about with it was taken from failsafeman. Maybe 15 years ago in the heyday of that recommendation thread it got some relative popularity. Otherwise I feel like it's just a few specific bands like Manilla Road or Crimson Glory, and then threads like this where people spend time ranting about how stupid USPM is as a genre descriptor and how irrationally angry it makes them to see regular "heavy metal" subcategorized.

Don't get me wrong, I 100% that it is incredibly dorky and completely useless to anyone who isn't incredibly interested in that kind of sound. But how many people besides me are really waxing poetic about the virtues of USPM in 2024? I think it's more of a historical significance at this point with how hot a topic it was a decade or more ago.

One of the best subgenres in metal, produced some of the best albums ever recorded and it is broad, rich and varied (from early QR to power/thrash gems of the late 80s), always relevant to anyone who likes good metal. That is my opinion and the opinion of every metalhead I know who doesn't just listen to modern or extreme bands.

Genres/subgenres are meant to be descriptive umbrella terms, so a degree of ambiguity, variation and overlap within them is to be expected. I don't think genre alone can tell you what makes a subset of bands different from another though; part of it has to do with what's beyond words, such as the logic and mentality behind what they're playing, and how you sense that is pretty much down to gut feeling.

I don't see the problem because the existence of genre and subgenre tags does not determine your own personal approach or mentality.

If you don't like technical death metal band A but want to be open, simply try technical death metal band B, and I guess that's exactly what you do (and what many people do sometimes).

On the other hand, people who don't want to be open to everything all the time can wallow in collecting all the B sides of a particular subgenre and ignore other subgenres: a different approach and mentality but, nonetheless, a road to happiness.

As I said, I don't see the problem, but I'm beginning to see that things like openness and closed-mindedness are the moons of planet Genre. The question is: Does someone like Bruce, who derides categorisation and discussions about categories, come across as open or closed (like a box)?



"Short-lived" is the keyword here. Another one is 'from a time when planet Genre was still pretty unexplored and uncharted' (that's actually more than one word). I think back then, in a time when everything was still wild and bands tried to find their individual paths through the virgin forest, critics and fans lost out on their chance to tame certain subgenres, and USPM was one of them – because it was indeed short-lived. It came and went. After a couple of years there were "No Exit", "When Dream and Day Unite", "Perfect Symmetry", "Steps" and "A Social Grace" and replaced the almost-but-not-quite prog flavour of the so-called "white collar USPM". Today, there are probably people who miss that misty almost-but-not-quite flavour and, therefore, face that corner of the past with the "intense scrutiny" of the archeologist. What's so weird about that? Is it really just the white/blue divide? And what's so weird about that? What's weird about differentiating between 'polished & technical' and 'rough-and-ready'? Between, let's say, Atheist and Bolt Thrower and the microscenes they produced?

"What's weird about differentiating between 'polished & technical' and 'rough-and-ready'?"

Back to the book analogy (sorry), this is less like differentiating between crime fiction and romance fiction, and more like splitting the romance section in the store into small subsections. "Romance novels with mystery elements," "romance novels featuring a protagonist with red hair," "romance novels featuring an anthropomorphic dragon love interest," etc. Needless to say this gets messy and creates confusion. Maybe there's book that fits two of the aisles, where does that go? Cue pointless debating. There's a certain point where these categories impede organization rather than help you organize things.

AJFA revitalized Thrash imo (maybe for few years)but imagine another ten years of Bonded by Blood,Feel th Fire etc..

Boring….

Thrash was destined to fall but not because the cliché of Metallica but for evolution of more extreme genres…

It’s natural…

Bullshit boring. Sounds like a fun time to me. And I say that as someone that loves death and black metal. Great music is great music regardless of genre. And its not like thrash wouldn't have integrated the harsher vocal styles.




This is just projection. In that interview he literally names Sepultura. Granted that was 30 years ago rather than 50, but at least get your decades right.



That's what I got from it too.

Fun make same album again and again?

Agreed – but your examples…



…are a lot more specific (maybe even hyperspecific ) than the simple distinction between 'technical' and 'snotty'. It's basically the same distinction we already know from thrash metal (technical thrash vs. straightforward or Sodom-like thrash), death metal (technical or progressive death metal vs. something that's often described as old school death metal: Bolt Thrower, Entombed, Dismember, Obituary etc., relatively straightforward stuff) and so on.



I'd say in both aisles – and why not? Or rather: in both aisles unless somebody comes up with ultra-precise definitions and a knock-down argument that renders a double placement impossible. If you think genre debates are pointless: what kind of debates do you deem "not pointless"?

Not even Exodus could make Bonded by Blood again.