Stalking the Archives, I've noticed quite a few people have a certain beef with one type of Metal sub genre in particular. Melodeath.

Honestly, if I had to guess, besides Power Metal, Melodeath is the most hated genre of metal in this community (Excluding -core bands, of course.) The thing that makes me wonder though, is that while I have seen people denounce Melodeath, I've never seen any reasons for doing so.

So, I ask you, MA'ers, what reasons do you have for disliking Melodeath? Is it too mainstream? Not brutal enough? Too radio friendly? On the opposite side, what do Melodeath fans have to say in its defense?

I think a lot of people hate it because, to be honest, the vast majority of it is sub-par At The Gates worship. I've heard a few good melodeath bands but they're very few and far between, most of them are just kind of boring.

I agree with MortalScum. Much of it seems to be copying each other's ideas.

MA users hate power metal? When did this start?

I don't like melodic death metal because it rarely resonates any emotion in me. The sounds and instruments and vocals used do not excite me or really do anything for me at all - of course there are always exceptions, but a lot of the stuff I hear is like that.

I like Amon Amarth.

Or Melodeath. I didn't know you all hated that either.

Actually, OP, Power Metal does get a lot of love around here. Personally, I love melodeath, and have done ever since listening to Heartwork.
Of course I can't deny that a lot of melodeath is largely unoriginal, but that doesn't really bother me at all.

I don't hate melodeath as a genre at all. I can see why lots of users here find it stagnant though.

I find that there's plenty of good melodeath bands. Amon Amarth, Dark Tranquillity, Hypocrisy, and Kalmah are good mainstream bands. The Elysian Fields (last album), Skyfire and Visceral Evisceration are all good less than mainstream bands. Especially Visceral Evisceration.

Hating all the shitty bands in a sub genre does not mean you hate the sub genre. Otherwise it'd be impossible to ever like grindcore

Hm, I love melodeath, but I certainly understand why the genre would be hated. Insomnium, Dark Tranquillity, Nightrage, etc, are great bands, but stuff like Blinded Colony and Zonaria...no thank you. There are way too many bands with generic riffs and vocals. That can be nice at times though, like Rise To Fall, but it's usually not the case.


Power metal gets some hate because it's cheesy and not evil...while black metal is cheesy and evil. The evilness makes it cool in the minds of some people. Not in mine though.

Really? I always loved Zonaria.

Melodeath was my gateway genre, but honestly after the first few months I just couldn't find much more to enjoy in it. Alot of those bands sound incredibly similiar and incredibly boring, with this really stale feeling. I dunno, they just all seem so generic.

I like a very small amount of melodic death, but the kicker for me is actual death metal influence, besides vocals. I like early ATG (Gardens of Grief through With Fear...) for this reason, still rooted largely in death metal, with melodic flair. I like Eucharist's A Velvet Creation as a more "straight up" melodeath album, but other than that, I'm not to keen on anything else I've heard.

My main beef with melodeath is that it's too reliant on sugary sounding melodies and harmonies to carry the music forward. Sure, some nice melodic riffs can sound fucking awesome. But, when that's all the music is built off of, it doesn't take many listens before you realize you're not listening to a real composition, you're just listening to melodic guitar lines strewn together and repeated ad nauseam with some generic riffing thrown in the mix.

There are excpetions, of course, but I find a lot of melodeath just seems to lack compositional depth. Often bands will fall back on the typical verse-chorus-verse song structure (far more than traditional death metal) and, if there are actual RIFFS present (not based on sugary melodic leads), they just aren't very interesting.

All in all, I just can't find much interest in an entire genre that takes one specific musical trait and bases everything it does around that. I much prefer bands that infuse melody to supplement the composition, instead of basing the composition around it.

News to me that people don't like Melo-death or power metal. I think with power metal it tends to be the super-fluffy stuff. Which I guess I like anyway

I like Melo-death all right, but am fairly picky about bands. Like any other genre, there's a lot of blah melo-death. Unlike other genres, I think there's more melo-death that fits that "blah" niche than there are great melo-death bands. That's probably why.

If that's that, I'ma go listen to Scar Symmetry now.

It's pretty much the genre that got me into metal music, and bands like Dark tranquillity, Eucharist, Dimension Zero, and Night in Gales are bands I still enjoy.

the only power metal I see get any hate around here are flowery bands like Sonata Arctica

I believe much of the hate stems from the name itself. It should never have been dubbed "death metal" in any way, since it is not.

Oh please, plenty of melodic death bands are quite "death metal".

I think there's actually quite a lot of differentiation in this little subgenre, which I guess I'd prefer to call by the location of its general forefathers...Gothenberg metal, if you will, though i recognise that it's a somewhat obnoxious designation too. IN any case, I haven't listened to much new stuff in the field, but some of the originators were pretty interesting. I really appreciate Dark Tranquillity's The Gallery even though I haven't listened to it in years, as the composition is just so top-notch and the melodies extremely arresting. An album like At the Gates's slaughter of the SOul, which seems to have influenced a great many of the modern practitioners, as well as some stuff in the metalcore area, sounds very different from the aforementioned DT record. In Flames's stuff like The Jester Race is largely very different again, though there's some commonality between this and the Dark Tranquillity album.

Anyway, I'd certainly be interested in hearing new bands that could blow my mind the way The Gallery did when I was sixteen. It seems though that many of the newcomers opt for the worst traits of Colony-era In Flames or that previously mentiond ATG album, which I really and truly only need to hear once, for their inspiration. I'm also not a fan of infusing this style with keyboards as it seems to take away from the firmly guitar-centric and harmony-based notions that the style was based on. Dark Tranquillity actually had the right idea with this when they made Projector as they were firmly establishing an entirely new territory far apart from any of their melodeath piers, but then immediately proceeded to suck very hard afterwards.

I feel the exact opposite. The genre shines when masterful use of synthesizers and samples are present. I also think that Character is one of Dark Tranquillity's best albums, I enjoy it just as much as The Gallery.

Well, that's news to me that people around here hate on PM/MDM, I always thought they got a lot of love around here ?

Personally, I'm not big on either genre, but to be honest, a little bit isn't too bad in small doses
But I'm only talking about the bigger bands, so ATG and Blind Guardian respectively

I'm of just like a lot of other Australians, I like a mix of Black/Death/Thrash, leaning more to the Black/Thrash side

I think lots of people hate on melodeath because a lot of it sounds the same. While there are still bands that have very original sounds, many of them add core elements and generic sounds that make them less "original". Cinders Fall is a great example of this (if you are a CF fan, please don't be offended): while they make great music, to be frank they are basically Parkway Drive with a death metal influence.

Also, plenty of melodeath bands nowadays sound very similar to one another. Dark Tranquillity and Skyfire, in my honest opinion, have very similar sounds, as well as Amon Amarth and Hypocrisy.

This is why, for me, when it comes to melodeath I tend to like particular albums and not the band as a whole. I know, I'm weird . My personal favorites are: Dark Tranquillity's The Gallery, Soilwork's The Chainheart Machine, and Nightrage's Descent Into Chaos.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I also think Abominatrix has a good point about DT and the genre in general.

There are quite a few really great Melodeath bands out there - Carcass, At The Gates, (early) In Flames, Arsis, Amon Amarth.

But nowadays, it seems like most of them are very formulaic and boring, They rarely do anything original, and even tend to borrow a lot of idea's from the metalcore genre, and vice-versa.

I like quite a bit of melodeath actually. It helped me get into death metal more and I still listen to quite a few of the bands I started out with. Dark Tranquillity is still one of my favorite bands.

Personally I just think as a general rule the music is crap. That by itself can be classified as strong dislike, not hate. The hate came in around a decade ago when Nuclear Blast decided to sign every fucking gay-ass Gothenburg clone on the planet, one more vapid and vacuous than the other, and gave the whole crap a complete marketing overkill so they could be seen and heard everywhere. In Flames and At the Gates suck, yeah, but I can live with that, bands suck, that's a fact of life. But Soilwork, Scar Symetry and all that recycled and over-polished garbage with their done-a-million-times-before guitar hooks, obnoxious flirtations with alternative or pop influences? Don't make me fucking puke. Nuclear Blast's Gothenburg clone army, that's where the hate comes from, hands down.

+1

I'd agree that the hate is largely from the name of the genre. A lot of the confusion almost certainly comes from the whole Gothenburg business because it lacks most of the features which American (styled) bands introduced. Whether Gothenburg is death metal is an issue which is constant flame war fodder, so I will avoid that.

While not wanting to open that Pandora's Box, I will say that Gothenburg influenced bands and death metal with an emphasis on melody should be completely separate. When I see a list that includes both Arsis and (Jester Race era) In Flames in this context, I have to raise an eyebrow.

I love Melodeath, but like all genres it has a lot of crap. I am not of Traditional Death Metal, apart from Nile, Kataklsym, Hypocrisy but everyone has their likes and dislikes though.

I love Arch Enemy, Dark Tranquillity and Children of Bodom from the Melodeath genre.

Nile and Kataklysm aren't "traditional death metal".

I've liked stuff like Amon Amarth for a while, but I've only recently started to really pay much attention to melodeath bands. I dig the first At the Gates album but none of the later stuff does anything for me. I also like Insomnium and Kalmah are pretty similar to Amon Amarth so are decent but not mind-blowing or anything. Nothing I've heard by In Flames, DT, Soilwork and a couple of the other big names has really done anything for me. I'm sure there are more bands in the genre I'll discover later and enjoy, though, but on the whole the early melodeath I've heard was just sort of boring. I'd rather listen to Dismember for my melodic death metal needs. The newer stuff often seems incredibly similar to metalcore to my ears, so I'll pass on that.

I don't think there's such a thing as a genre that doesn't have copycats, especially since considering Black, Death and Thrash are just as, if not painfully worse then Melo death with that. My opinion is the usual, it's popular but these people don't particularly care for the popular bands, not hate, just don't care. So that over fapping plus their apathetic feelings turn to hate. It's my biggest beef with the metal community.

As someone who has listened to quite a bit of melodeath, there are loads of great Gothenburg bands from Gothenburg (obviously) and Stockholm that just never had the success In Flames or DT had. A Canarous Quintet is a prime example.

Some melodeath bands kind of overuse the keyboards and clean vocals. It really dilutes the metal in it. Melodeath is probably my favorite genre but you have to sift through so much crap to find that gem with the perfect balance between melody and metal.

Some good melodeath bands:

Kalmah
Crystalic
Amon Amarth? I dunno if they're widely considered melodeath but the catch the same kind of flak for not being metal enough.
Arch Enemy
Carcass (heartwork specifically)
Insomnium
In Flames (The old shit)

Some terrible examples:
Dark Tranquility (Overuses the clean vocals. just too cheesy)
In Flames (New shit. Hardly fits the criteria for melodeath.)
Anything out of NWOAHM. They call themselves melodeath but they just suck.

another hated genre is Folk Metal. But it's the same story. there's some good bands in there.

Moonsorrow anyone?

That's coz we are farken good at it!

Yes, but have you heard their first couple of albums? they are sick. And how come nobody has mentioned Dethklok yet???

Most of it is too cheesy, and the "melodies" are very fruity and cliche. It doesn't actually have much in common with death metal except the vocals, and the vocals in melodeath are usually higher pitched. I just think it's death metal without the brutality and energy that makes the genre so awesome.

I dislike a lot of it because a lot of it sounds like power metal with death metal vocals (obviously a little heavier guitar tone though)

The equation does not work when your playing heavily melodic music with no balls to it, and then just putting DM vocals over it. Death metal riffs that are melodic do work. What I feel is that with almost every genre, after the initial bands coin a specific sound, later generation bands take what is supposed to be the subtlety of the sound and exaggerate the fuck out of it.


Melodic death metal done right - Dismember.
Melodic black metal done right - Dissection

Melodic death metal done wrong - Children of bodom

EDIT: and yes cheese is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear a lot of MDM and PM

The "I hate/dislike this particular genre/category because most bands classified as such happen to suck" argument seems misguided to say the least, a plain fallacy to say more, and intellectual dishonesty to say how I actually perceive it. Name one fucking genre that the exact same excuse couldn't possibly be used to hate on!

There's plenty of shitty, derivative, fake-sounding melodeath bands, albums and songs, yes. And even more for black metal, power metal, thrash or "non-melo" death metal, for instance. One or a billion, these shouldn't weigh in the balance at all, not even in relation to the number of great bands, albums and songs in the same field; it's only the latter that anyone should give a shit about. People telling you power metal is flowery have yet to hear power metal worth mentioning, or they didn't pay enough attention while they were listening to it (perhaps due to some "power metal is flowery" bias?). Same for "melodeath has no interesting riffs" or whatever.

I love melodeath, which I personally interpret in the broader sense of "the portion of the musical spectrum that sits at the junction of power metal and death metal". In no particular order (and very limited in choice by YouTube), fantastic stuff like:

Dark Tranquillity - On Your Time
Sacrilege- Feed the cold
Arch Enemy - Angelclaw
Soilwork - Wings Of Domain
Sins of Omission - Eager for the Fray
Children of Bodom - Children of Bodom
Edge of Sanity - Twilight
Theriomorphic - Theriomorphic
Carcass - This Mortal Coil
In Flames - Lunar Strain
At The Gates - Under A Serpent Sun
Misanthrope - Le Supplicié
Dead Silent Slumber - Blood Collapse
Amon Amarth - Once Sent From The Golden Hall

Let me make my point clearer. If instead of the above you have this type of thing in mind when you think "melodeath":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1FkbvGl-IU

Of course you'll think it's pathetic shameless shit. But a better term for it would be "deathcore", "mainstream metal ersatz", "shitty tough guy pop music", or even just "shit". Calling this "melodeath" is akin to calling the Black Album "thrash", quite frankly.