So is there anyone else doing concept albums like Nightwish' "Endless Forms Most Beautiful"?
Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
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Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#42Impressive work. I believe Encyclopaedia Metallum[0] would be a better source for the corpus, though the noise rate would be higher as there are many one-song/single/demo album bands, along with bands making music in multiple genres in different eras in their lifetime. 0. https://www.metal-archives.com/
The ability to find lyrics on lyric sites would be a reasonable proxy for sufficient popularity, I’d imagine.
On a semi-related note, when talking about large genre-specific corpuses, https://vgmdb.net has a fascinating scope definition across all things game and animation adjacent, including both the massive doujin (fan-made) music scene and the full discographies of many j-pop artists and composers, all annotated by franchise adjacency with (often) full staff credits: https://vgmdb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=22321
It’s a fascinating corpus and one I’d love to analyze deeply one day.
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#43I only recently discovered Blind Guardian. Typically listened to thrash, rarely power metal. Man, what excellence. Brilliant vocals, great choruses, distinct and unique sense of melody both on guitar and vocals. Something I really love about them is that vocals, guitars, and drums all have very prominent and distinct parts. In many bands I feel like one instrument will often dominate and the band becomes boring. I.e.…
Blind Guardian carried me through high school on the backs of dragons.
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#44I only recently discovered Blind Guardian. Typically listened to thrash, rarely power metal. Man, what excellence. Brilliant vocals, great choruses, distinct and unique sense of melody both on guitar and vocals. Something I really love about them is that vocals, guitars, and drums all have very prominent and distinct parts. In many bands I feel like one instrument will often dominate and the band becomes boring. I.e.…
In fairness, early BG very much aligns more with speed metal, which is a fairly close sibling to thrash. It was that vector that got me into them more than my latter appreciation for power metal in all its bombastic soaring-vocal glory.
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#45I only recently discovered Blind Guardian. Typically listened to thrash, rarely power metal. Man, what excellence. Brilliant vocals, great choruses, distinct and unique sense of melody both on guitar and vocals. Something I really love about them is that vocals, guitars, and drums all have very prominent and distinct parts. In many bands I feel like one instrument will often dominate and the band becomes boring. I.e.…
Hah, wow, I went through a massive Blind Guardian phase. Love their stuff.
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#46I only recently discovered Blind Guardian. Typically listened to thrash, rarely power metal. Man, what excellence. Brilliant vocals, great choruses, distinct and unique sense of melody both on guitar and vocals. Something I really love about them is that vocals, guitars, and drums all have very prominent and distinct parts. In many bands I feel like one instrument will often dominate and the band becomes boring. I.e.…
I still consider "Nightfall in middle earth" one of the best albums of all times. I remember waiting in front of the recordstore on the releasday in 1998, came home and listened to it from start to finish a few times while reading the newest "Rock Hard" magazine, good times. Even today it's one of the few albums I still enjoy listening from start to finish.
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#47I found power metal because I was looking for a more positive sub-genre of metal. What I was listening to before often had ahrimanic themes - death, violence, satanism etc.
I grew up on power metal and nowadays I mainly listen to two genres: black metal and classical music. One of the things they have in common is that I can't understand a word in either. I really appreciate that because I find lyrics in songs distracting and most of the time cringy.
There's a lot of overlap between metal and classical music (by which I mean orchestral, symphonic, and chamber, not the specific age). Something about the composition and structure of the music activates similar parts of my brain, and both are excellent to work to.
(Of course, there's only so far you can push this—some metal bands are much closer to pop or jazz, and some classical music is quite distinctively its own thing.)
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#48I found power metal because I was looking for a more positive sub-genre of metal. What I was listening to before often had ahrimanic themes - death, violence, satanism etc.
I grew up on power metal and nowadays I mainly listen to two genres: black metal and classical music. One of the things they have in common is that I can't understand a word in either. I really appreciate that because I find lyrics in songs distracting and most of the time cringy.
Lyrics in metal I assume? Otherwise that's a rather wide brush.
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#49I'd like to use this thread to spread the word of our lord and savior Powerwolf. I discovered them just over two years ago and they immediately became my favorite band: their mix of themes, aesthetic and impressive vocals are amazing. Plus they're a ton of fun live and sound just as good :)
Re: Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't listen to music with vocals at work, but I still listen to power metal 20 years later in quite a few contexts - gym, car, walk, simply active listening. I can't argue with the quality of the lyrics being cringey though. I've always thought it's a combination of the genre being niche and being founded on a set of lyrical themes that are restrictive - and maybe particularly challenging -, and also, the fact tha…
I can imagine some lyrics can be hard to listen to for an english speaking native. Manowar made a german version of "Heart of steal" it's called "Herz aus Stahl" it's so bad when I heard it for the first time I thought "Oh man I hope we don't sound that bad to all the people who speak english when we're singing english."
I don't know if it's that bad... In my experience the English lyrics from these euro power metal bands are ~98% good, but then there's the odd line that has you reach for a thesaurus to see if that's real English or they've pulled it out of their butts, and most of the time it's the latter. It's pretty off-putting, it would be perfectly OK if that was it, but it often brings your attention to the fact that the lyrics are very weak in general.