I've begun finding a bit of an issue with the consistency of genre tags. I know that for the site's standards, "death/black" and "black/death" are pretty much the same thing, but this gets a bit more tricky when it comes to genre tags with multiple adjectives, such as "technical brutal" and "brutal technical".

For instance, Abolition of Impediment are tagged as "brutal technical death metal", whereas Defeated Sanity are tagged "technical brutal death metal". Similarly, we've got bands that are "technical melodic" and "melodic technical", same as we've got "progressive melodic" and "melodic progressive".

This becomes a bit of a mess and makes me confused about a band's actual genre, and it is rather ugly when looking through the band list in a search and seeing the genres switched up. I was wondering if it'd be possible to just make a quick SQL query to normalize all these genre tags, or if there is an actual reason for the order of the adjectives.

My best guess is that Abolition of Impediment (I've never listened to them) are a technical death metal band with more brutal elements that you don't hear in bands like Obscura.

Defeated Sanity are considered brutal death metal with some technical undertones you don't hear in some other brutal death metal bands.

Then you have bands that have elements of both genres, some varying with the album.

I guess that's the difference between brutal technical death metal and technical brutal death metal.

The way I see it, the closer the adjective is to the word metal, the more that adjective makes their core sound.

The exception is when forward slash is used where the first adjective of the slashed together words is the more prominent descriptor.

e.g. death/black leans more into death metal and black/death leans into black metal, same goes with doom/death leaning towards doom and death/doom leaning towards death.

That is my understanding anyway.

BU it's not pretty much the same thing honestly, I totally agree with the two comments above or at least this is how the majority of the site users tend to understand the genres, although moderators might not see it that way or at least some of them don't, it's pretty much debatable and therefore keeping things as they are is probably the best way to go.

Yes, it's pretty much this.

HEAVY METAL

Uhm... It's precisely this that the site previously has stated that it does not differentiate between? Hence the OP writing " I know that for the site's standards, "death/black" and "black/death" are pretty much the same thing".

When I add, or even just talk about, a band that plays a mixture of doom and death, I always write "doom/death", regardless of which genre is the most prevalent in the specific case. I do the same with black/death, black/thrash, death/thrash, etc. Partly because I've seen mods state that they don't differentiate between the order, but also because there would be no way to differentiate between a band with one genre more prevalent and a band where the genre mixture is 50/50.

This sounds like something which some mods have one way of looking at and others have another.

Yeah, generally that, but also this


It's important to understand that this level of consistent categorization would add another layer of work (and upkeep). Assessing genres to such a degree that the order of modifiers bears significance is simply not something we want to spend our time on (and hence do not). But yeah, I suppose a few mods may chose to (sometimes?) and it's not like the others are going to strictly forbid it. So in general you're better off not looking for any intent behind the word order.