In a very basic way, Dark metal is mix of doom, black and folk. Empyrium's first 2 albums are probably the best example. Other stuff that can fit is Bethlehem, Agalloch, (Some old) Katatonia, Deinonychus, October Falls' metal albums, among others.

dark metal is often applied to stuff like recent rotting christ or root as well. it's not a very useful term

I think that qualifies more as simple melodic black metal:p

I don't know about "doom," but Mistress and Fuckhammer mix grind and sludge pretty seamlessly. Or there's always Disembowelment, who mixed ultra-slow death/doom bordering on funeral doom, with deathgrind blast sections.

"Epic death metal" might be something like Timeghoul, though they could just as easily be considered progressive death.

I don't know a great deal about - or generally care for - deathcore, but earlier Abigail Williams might fit the bill. Their later stuff is apparently closer to pure black metal.

As for "folky thrash" all I can think of is Sabbat/Skyclad, or maybe CF's 'Into the Pandemonium' if I'm really stretching.

"Grindgaze"? Don't think I can help you there, sorry.

I think I've got a winner here. Can someone help me out with "opensourced black spiritmetal"?

Seriously, this was promoted by a certain band as a real genre but it sounds like nonsense to me.

This is highly misleading - concerning Sabbat and the question about an amalgamation of thrash and folk metal.
Were a person pretty familiar with more recent incarnations of folk infused metal yet unfamiliar with Sabbat spin History of a Time to Come - there'd be literally zero elements affinity between the two (thrash being the latter genre of interest). Dreamweaver might yield better results but only due to acoustic segments - but they don't even employ your standard folk instruments. Having said that, I think Sabbat isn't to bee mentioned when such genre mixtures are concerned.

Art rock, anyone? I wonder what that is. Is there something called art metal too?

You're not alone. I've been following death metal for 8 years and I've only heard this term used in the last month or so. It's driving me nuts.

The first link to Devourment was deleted, so here's another one of their cuts...


If that song is any indication, then "slam" means "really boring drumgasm with no riffs and a guy going BRRRRRRMMMMMMRRRRRREEEEUUUUUUGGGGHHHH."

I am going to clean my ears out with some real death metal ASAP.

slams are a specific kind of breakdown thats these bands often utilize all over the place. There are more common elements among the bands within the style than just this but this is where the name comes from. You could write a Dismember song and add slams and it would still be slam death.

Doomgrind kinda exists already. There are a bunch of sludgy grindcore and powerviolence bands out there.

Apologies if this has been asked before, but are there any Country metal bands? I know of Volbeat and Hank III as well as Rebel Meets Rebel, but are there any others?

Country stylings in harder rock and metal generally tend to end up in some sort of southern rock/southern metal styling. It's a bit hard to generalize though, as country is such an old and broad style, and it influenced and blended with rock and roll and blues/rock. You don't really hear a hard contrast of distinctly country music and distinctly metal music, and country influences in metal tend to be from rock-leaning fusion styles anyway. I don't know country that well, so I'm kinda guessing based on knowing a bit of Hanks I-III, Bob Seger, and Garth Brooks' "Beer Run."

Metallica covered Bob Seger's "Turn the Page" - I guess you see the sort of contrast where a country rock song covered as a metal song is pretty similar to the same sort of styling as country/southern-tinged heavy metal/hard rock. Hell, you even get a lot of alt hard rock/post-grunge/bands that sound like Nickelback doing a southern/country feeling song or two, but I guess that's more southern than country? Seems like there's an indirect fusion but nothing that really contrasts the two.

Tjolgtjar has done some interesting folky Americana-tinged black metal/garage rock sorta stuff on recent albums, interesting and somewhat related.

I'd love to know if there's a such thing as:
-Groove Thrash Metal; not just Groove Metal and Thrash Metal, but together? I know that sounds ridiculous, but I've seen that many times with certain bands.
-Medieval Black Metal - is that a thing or just a way of describing a lyrical complexion in a band's music, because plenty of times I've heard bands like Godkiller [The Rebirth of the Middle Ages EP], Summoning, [early] Satyricon, etc. which all have a medieval tone to the music, but I'm assuming they or at least some of them can be considered just Symphonic Black Metal or just Raw Black Metal...??
-Melodic Thrash Metal - is that an actual genre or is it somewhat of a oxymoron considering most Thrash bands stay pretty standard with their guitar playing? If Melodic Thrash exists, could I be given examples so I know that whether or not it's a thing?

Uh, you're joking, right? There's a ton of groove/thrash so I'm not even sure what you're asking. There's a fair amount of black metal with neo-medieval bits in it, and it varies in how it is implemented - acoustic guitars, harpsichord synths, vaguely medieval melodies. Plenty of vaguely medieval-sounding melodies too.

There's plenty of melodic thrash, but bands on the archives aren't commonly tagged as such because thrash often had dual guitar melodies and melodic vocalists. After all, the biggest thrash band was really melodic. There's some heavy/power metal (USPM sorta stuff) that's pretty thrashy too. The differentiations in thrash tend to describe the more extreme aspects of it - brutal thrash, thrash/death, thrash/black. It's not like "melodic death metal" where the basic form isn't usually melodic. Speaking of which, I'd say more than half the stuff submitted as "melodic thrash metal" on MA is metalcore, up to about 90% with "melodic death/thrash metal."

melodic thrash to me is basically thrash on the other side of early kreator/demolition hammer.
Compare:


with:

Probably been asked before, but what's the difference between "Black/Death Metal" and "Blackened Death Metal"? I guess there's some difference, but what really sets them apart?

Quite simple really, "Blackened Death Metal" is death metal with slight influences from black metal and "black/death" is a mix of both. Some say that "black/death" and "death/black" are different as well probably because the first genre is more important than the second.

Blackened death metal is an easier phrase to speak, but yeah, what Tony said. I wouldn't differentiate this stuff too much because in any context, nitpicking syntax (b/d vs d/b) is less informative than any other way of getting to the point of what it sounds like.

Black/death metal can refer to that savage, bestial style of Blasphemy, Archgoat and such, and sometimes even earlier bands. I think the best example of blackened death metal is the Polish style of Behemoth, Azarath and such. Technically, blackened death metal is just more specific. Behemoth could be called black/death metal, but blackened death metal is probably more accurate is all.

i just call all of those bands black/death but i dont really think newer behemoth is all that black metal. It sounds like gateways morbid angel way more than anything else.

Yeah, the newer albums are more death metal apparently. I think the early 00s style is blackened death metal, though.

I read a little about the whole "thrashcore" discussion ... My opinion is that this "Thrashcore" sounds like Grindcore , but slightly less fast and waaaaaay less Metallic ... Grindcore (IMO) should be on metal-archives DEPENDING on the amount of "Metal" on it ... early Napalm Death has a lot of Metal on it whereas Extreme Noise Terror (which is more on the CRUST side) has way less Metal on its music than ND ...

Grindcore was influenced by thrashcore. However it often these days is faster than grindcore. Also fun: there is also fastcore which is basically powerviolence with no tempo changes and this at times gets very close to thrashcore.

I always thought thrashcore and fastcore could be used synonymously.


ENT aren't on MA because of their crustgrind output.

What is MA's definition on brutal deathcore? It's a bit confusing to me, when is a deathcore band even more brutal than the genre itself already implies? The line between deathcore and (brutal) death metal is really quite thin nowadays. I mean, look at Carnifex's debut, Acrania's debut album, Impending Doom's debut, heck, even Suicide Silence's debut, they're all very "deathcore", but they're also heavy and brutal as f*ck already.

Anyway, I feel the term is a bit vague on MA, what makes Acrania more brutal than Carnifex apart from an occasional piq squeal and slam? Basically any deathcore album nowadays has a breakdown with slam characteristics, and piq squeals are almost default in deathcore. And in terms of heaviness...deathcore is basically as heavy as death metal-influenced music is gonna get.

If MA were to keep this term, I'd rather see it on bands like Ingested, Awaiting The Autopsy, Vulvodynia etc, which are basically the closest to a deserved "brutal" tag deathcore is gonna get. And while some of these bands already have this tag, I feel it needs to be reserved for bands like these, and these only.

I feel that if MA finds this a distinct enough tag, we might as well consider adding slam death as a genre, because I feel that's a well-seperated genre from brutal death metal by now, even if it's not really technically a genre...

Thrashcore is a pretty tough term to pin down because it's not too widely used, and I've seen it used to describe a wide variety of hardcore, crust, crossover, grind, and thrash.

I don't think I've ever touched a band on MA labeled as "brutal deathcore" but I'd assume it's deathcore chock full o' brutal death metal slams and other things that would make MutantClannfear squeal like a farm animal.



I think you just have shitty taste in/are wrong about deathcore music everything.

I appreciate the efforts to keep it all in line, and right some of these monstrous wrongs in metal sub-genre classification. On surface, it seems odd that grown men and women would be this pedantic, but this is metal we are talking about.

My only question is what is considered as 'heavy metal' or 'metal' in 2014 , at least for the majority here ?

What's metal? Fortunately, I keep a list of examples that a group of experts have largely agreed on as being metal.
http://www.metal-archives.com/search/ad ... enre=metal

Hahaaaa !

Guess i deserved that.

Carry on.

Maybe it was the Mozilla IT crowd trying to play some Emperor influenced black metal.

Is there really a point to debate genre minutia, since when people talk about the small sub genres they seem to mostly refer to how the music makes them feel? Is it possible that metal genres can be looked at as having four main genres, heavy, thrash, black, and death. Then everything else is merely a mixture of those to varying degrees with other outside influences brought in? I personally try to just stick to those four with a few outliers thrown in. Aren't genre names subjective anyway? To me if its got a lot of blast beats its probably death metal, if uses soaring vocals and medival subject matter its probably heavy metal. Just some general rules. Maybe genre names can be like food ingredients, with the most heavily used substance listed first and so on.

Maybe i misinterpreted the forum discussion.

Speed, doom, stoner, groove, sludge ...

Nah, you just don't understand genres.

There's a reason this is called the stupid genre question thread...

Yes, genres are subjective. Usage of common terms also varies a lot, but those of us with a lot of experience with media, perception, and music also tend to be able to explain what something means. You'll find Slayer's "Hell Awaits" and early Celtic Frost referred to as death metal on the ideological end of perception, and you'll hear stuff like Solution .45 and Sonic Syndicate referred to as death metal on the far end of another perspective. Neither of those sounds like the commonly-defined death metal essentials, but there's a reason for each of those. There's also a lot of people, especially on sites like AllMusic (a Wikipedia-trusted source) who literally have no idea what they're talking about, which feeds some wacky labelings of bands.

It might be worth the exercise of exchanging these terms for those of phylogeny: "Is it possible that Eukaryota can be looked at as having eight main kingdoms, everything else being merely a mixture of those to varying degrees with environmental influences brought in? Is there really a point to debate species minutiae?"

Music can breed easily across kingdom, so its hybrids multiply more quickly, but the flexibility of that doesn't preclude the usefulness of classification. The musical geneticists here have the expertise to clade with confidence, but not until a fair amount of debate has gone on in discussing borderline cases.

What is doom folk? Does it have anything to do with doom metal? Can someone please explain this?

I've personally never heard of "doom folk"...
Could you be thinking of something like (what I know as) Epic Doom/Heavy Metal?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewkz0bl5nVA

I guess mael mordha is folk/doom.

Gods Tower, Mael Mordha, Agalloch or even Primordial can be interpreted as doom/folk metal. It's pretty much any kind of folk put combined with doom, akin to black/folk, I guess.

Two good examples are actually the excellent The Flight of Sleipnir:



Also, the great French prog trad doom/folk band Northwinds, very underrated.

I love Agalloch of course, they are my fav band. I also love Mael Mordha. Although I never saw Primordial as a doom metal band. I'll listen to them again. However I was referring to this tag http://www.last.fm/tag/doom%20folk. It didn't make much sense to me.

EDIT: The Flight of Sleipnir sounds awesome. I like the fuzzy guitar and the vocals are also more melancholic.

Northwinds sounds nice but the vocals are a little more upbeat sounding. I guess I could still get into them if I concentrate more on the instruments. Thanks for bringing these bands to my attention.

Uaral used to play a depression soaked hybrid of neo-folk and doom. Too bad they broke up so soon.



Also Ereb Altor's first two albums are somewhere in between folk, viking and epic doom.



If you're referring to death-country or doom-country then Sons of Perdition and Those Poor Bastards have that kind of sound.