My final hall for now: Perfect Strangers is a hard rock heavy metal hybrid.
This is my final Hall submission of the day and for now. I don't want to flood the threads or halls anymore than I already have. BUT! If you're going to play this album, let me first tell you that side B is more metal than side A which is pretty light.
Ben was kind enough to include 22 Deep Purple releases for consideration due to my desire to add In Rock and my optional possibility to defend Perfect Strangers to this catalog here on Metal Academy. Honestly, that was a very nice thing to do. I was more than willing to wait for RYM to get their sticks out of their buts and at least tag In Rock, but that was a very kind gesture. 22 albums in between In Rock and Perfect Strangers must've been some hard work, so I'll honor that decision by submitting Perfect Strangers to the Hall. But most importantly, I feel that a specific quality of this album can raise for an interesting discussion concerning the hard rock heavy metal line.
Having said that, Perfect Strangers was always a maybe, since it really bridges that gap between hard rock and heavy metal on such a blurred line that different metal sites will say different things, and they all have different arguments. The decision on Metallum and Metalstorm's decision to tag and include Perfect Strangers seems to be built on the atmospheric / aural love of the album shown from many metalheads on those websites. So I will detail those opinions the best that I can.
Now Daniel brought up an interesting point before: some of these hard rock and heavy metal hybrids don't feel like metal to him because the types of instruments and tricks used to create the sounds aren't there. I feel that this argument has validity, but metal emerged from hard rock, and there's going to be occasional overlap. Thus, I feel that metal itself can be expressed in a plethora of ways. I now direct you to one of the most unique albums I have ever heard, a sludge / power electronics / powerviolence hybrid called The Lost M.I.T.B. Sessions by Man Is the Bastard. Not that this album has anything to do with that, but let's see where those other websites are coming from.
There are hard rock songs here and there are some heavily metal-infused atmospheres. This tells me that metal websites will include a strong atmosphere and incorporate the heavy inclusion and attitude therein into their catalogue, usually under both hard rock and heavy metal at the same time, differentiating these albums from "proto metal" or plain "hard rock" like Led Zeppelin IV. A wise choice.
I admit, our opener isn't much of a metal song. But then, we reach Under the Gun, which is loaded with guitar moments and droning sounds that sound a little heavier than most songs on In Rock. Most songs. And the title track alone is the perfect hard rock song for total metal fans. I mean, it's darker and harder in both presence and attitude than most hard rock and even some metal albums of its time. And then we reach Gypsy's Kiss. In defense of Gypsy's Kiss, I'm going to paste here a part of a review on Metallum for this album:
"Then, Gypsy's Kiss returns us to the heavy metal realms, speedy and joyful. Can you believe me if I tell you that there are, actually, keyboards' riffs?? If you don't, listen to this song. Jon Lord (and Blackmore, of course) gives us a powerful and speedy riff. And the singing, well, remains a bit groovy, but it is heavy metal, it has the heavy metal riffing, beating and style. A great song."
Yes, this album has a metal riff played on a freakin' organ. And it really does feel pretty metal. In continuation, Wasted Sunsets feels like a heavy metal ballad from the early days of metal ballads. Those play all the time on the rock and metal station at my area, and I'm not talking the glam metal. But IMO, the real star of the metal side of the album is Hungry Daze, incorporating neoclassical metal influences and some very hard heaviness here, bridging an odd line between hard rock and neoclassical metal instead of the norm. I would unquestionably put this in the same playlist with Symphony X.
And I'm stopping right there. I'm not including Not Responsible or Son of Alerik as those two were featured on rereleases instead of the original issue.
I don't really want to call this "hard rock" alone, but I feel like "light metal" would be the most appropriate term, as a band that partook in the next steps of heaviness after Led Zeppelin took the arena production of the 80's and incorporated it into a more metallic sound that soaked the hard rock, heavy metal and blues sides of their catalog on this album. The commentary and reasoning on Metalstorm has a basis, and I won't argue too hard or say these people are "objectively right or wrong" about something. So as long as the opinion stands, I'll attempt to dissect it. The album really does have a metal feel about it, and that not only defines the album, but sets it apart from other Deep Purple albums. On the one hand, I fully understand if you don't want to compare this to Iron Maiden, who aren't really hard rock so I wouldn't compare them. But at the same time, I also understand if you end up feeling that it bridges the gap.
So, is this a hard rock heavy metal hybrid? Or is this a hard rock album for the heavy metal fan? I respect the results either way, as usual.
I think I heard this album as a youngster but don't recall much about the experience so I don't have a position on its eligibility for metal status at this stage.
I've posted it in the Hall of Judgement for voting though so let's see what people think.
I listened to this fairly recently and don't consider that it meets the modern criteria as a metal release. As someone who was actually a rock/metal fan in the 1970s I think I could add some perspective here. Deep Purple were considered heavy metal back then, as were Led Zeppelin, UFO, KISS, Ted Nugent, BOC and even AC/DC. But the term was more an umbrella term for the heavier bands around, as opposed to the likes of Boston, Kansas and Aerosmith who had a lighter sound. Metal has since become an actually defined term and can be applied more rigourously and into which several of these earlier bands no longer fit, Deep Purple being one such I would suggest. GnR were never called heavy metal in my experience and were always referred to as a rock band.
Sadly I don't have a vote as I am not in The Guardians but a metal top 100 with Guns n Roses in it just seems so wrong for the premier internet metal site.
I listened to this fairly recently and don't consider that it meets the modern criteria as a metal release. As someone who was actually a rock/metal fan in the 1970s I think I could add some perspective here. Deep Purple were considered heavy metal back then, as were Led Zeppelin, UFO, KISS, Ted Nugent, BOC and even AC/DC. But the term was more an umbrella term for the heavier bands around, as opposed to the likes of Boston, Kansas and Aerosmith who had a lighter sound. Metal has since become an actually defined term and can be applied more rigourously and into which several of these earlier bands no longer fit, Deep Purple being one such I would suggest. GnR were never called heavy metal in my experience and were always referred to as a rock band.
Sadly I don't have a vote as I am not in The Guardians but a metal top 100 with Guns n Roses in it just seems so wrong for the premier internet metal site.
I think we as metal historians should try to remember what metal was back today. I mean, but the logic of evolution, one can say that Metallica won't even be metal once the world has gotten used to something much heavier than that, which IS possible.
I listened to this fairly recently and don't consider that it meets the modern criteria as a metal release. As someone who was actually a rock/metal fan in the 1970s I think I could add some perspective here. Deep Purple were considered heavy metal back then, as were Led Zeppelin, UFO, KISS, Ted Nugent, BOC and even AC/DC. But the term was more an umbrella term for the heavier bands around, as opposed to the likes of Boston, Kansas and Aerosmith who had a lighter sound. Metal has since become an actually defined term and can be applied more rigourously and into which several of these earlier bands no longer fit, Deep Purple being one such I would suggest. GnR were never called heavy metal in my experience and were always referred to as a rock band.
Sadly I don't have a vote as I am not in The Guardians but a metal top 100 with Guns n Roses in it just seems so wrong for the premier internet metal site.
I think we as metal historians should try to remember what metal was back today. I mean, but the logic of evolution, one can say that Metallica won't even be metal once the world has gotten used to something much heavier than that, which IS possible.
I think that back then there was less of a need to classify music into smaller and smaller genre boxes. A lot of the sub-genres that are applied to older music didn't exist at the time. In 1970 nobody referred to anything as heavy psych, for example. That is a term which has been applied much later, probably only since the advent of internet music appreciation. So broader terms like heavy metal - it was ONLY heavy metal then, it wasn't called metal, it was HEAVY metal - were applied to a much wider spectrum of artists, as were other styles like Disco, Punk, Funk, Pop, Psychedelia etc. Rock music would probably be the exception as there were glam rock, pop rock, soft rock and so on. Hard rock, heavy rock and heavy metal were used as interchangeable terms for basically the same bands (as I mentioned above). There has since, though, been a redefining of the term heavy metal which isn't the same (and which Daniel can explain far better than I), but causes confusion by having the same name. This is why there are anomalies such as glam metal (which even on RYM has rock as it's root, not metal) or a large percentage of the NWOBHM who didn't play what is now covered by the modern term metal - Girlschool, Tygers of Pan Tang etc.
I get what your point about Metallica possibly no longer being considered metal in the future, Rex, and, to a degree, that has already happened with the term extreme metal which may well have been used to describe Metallica at one point but which most certainly doesn't any more, but with a technical definition such as we now have for the term heavy metal or metal rather than the vague generalised term that it was in it's original usage, then that shouldn't happen.
Maybe it shouldn't happen, but these are the kinds of things that still lead to some unnecessary confusion. Nobody can even figure out what speed metal is anymore, apparently, and there are a million Killing Joke albums that blur the rock and metal line beyond the three more blatantly metal works: Hossanas, 2003 and Pandemonium. Basically, there's still room for growth in the technical definitions that we have, which is why a lot of hard rock heavy metal hybrids suffer when the line is blurred.
Please bare in mind that everything I'm about to say is just my opinion & I raise it purely in the interest of healthy discussion Rex but personally I don't think anyone is being disadvantaged by being dual tagged. In fact, I'd suggest that it's an advantage as there's a greater potential for fans of both genres to investigate the artist in question. I don't think the lines are as blurred as you're making out either. Perhaps they USED to be back in the 70's & 80's, mainly because a lot of the trademark sounds were still being defined so there was a lot of cross-pollination & the actual written definitions hadn't been firmed up as yet. That's not the case now though as we have clear definition around the attributes that each subgenre should possess in order to qualify. Sure, there will always be bands that represent hybrids but I don't see anything wrong with that.
I actually think that a lot of the confusion you mention comes from people that don't take the time to understand what a particular genre is all about by exploring the important releases that prompted the genre's creation in the first place & paying attention to the key elements at play before using the label to tag releases. Many people simply end up taking the genre names at face value & creating their own interpretations of what constitutes an x metal release. I'd suggest that's the case with the speed metal example you raised earlier as you need to go back to the underground scene of the 1980's in order to understand that genre properly but, once you do that, I don't think it's all that hard to identify. As an example of where the lines have been blurred unnecessarily, the term "melodic death metal" doesn't refer to ALL death metal that employs melody. It refers to a particular sound that contains some defined attributes but we often see people overlooking those by tagging any death metal that's remotely melodic as melodeath. The same goes for sludge metal. People seem to want to tag anything with a guitar tone that they deem to sound "sludgy" as sludge metal. Another example? "I hear a breakdown here. Must be metalcore then!" Is there actually any genuine hardcore influence though? Often the answer is no. I could go on & on & on about each genre in a similar manner but the moral of my story is that music doesn't just need to be "heavy" in order to qualify as metal in my opinion. It still needs to possess the attributes of the genres definition. If it possesses all of the key attributes of the hard rock definition but just happens to be heavy then it's simply a heavier example of hard rock. I don't think there's all that much of a grey area in the definitions. It's all in people's interpretations of them as a release either possesses the required attributes or it doesn't. If it possesses the attributes of both heavy metal & hard rock then a dual tagging is fine. There's no confusion there at all as far as I can see.
Please bare in mind that everything I'm about to say is just my opinion & I raise it purely in the interest of healthy discussion Rex but personally I don't think anyone is being disadvantaged by being dual tagged. In fact, I'd suggest that it's an advantage as there's a greater potential for fans of both genres to investigate the artist in question. I don't think the lines are as blurred as you're making out either. Perhaps they USED to be back in the 70's & 80's, mainly because a lot of the trademark sounds were still being defined so there was a lot of cross-pollination & the actual written definitions hadn't been firmed up as yet. That's not the case now though as we have clear definition around the attributes that each subgenre should possess in order to qualify. Sure, there will always be bands that represent hybrids but I don't see anything wrong with that.
I actually think that a lot of the confusion you mention comes from people that don't take the time to understand what a particular genre is all about by exploring the important releases that prompted the genre's creation in the first place & paying attention to the key elements at play before using the label to tag releases. Many people simply end up taking the genre names at face value & creating their own interpretations of what constitutes an x metal release. I'd suggest that's the case with the speed metal example you raised earlier as you need to go back to the underground scene of the 1980's in order to understand that genre properly but, once you do that, I don't think it's all that hard to identify. As an example of where the lines have been blurred unnecessarily, the term "melodic death metal" doesn't refer to ALL death metal that employs melody. It refers to a particular sound that contains some defined attributes but we often see people overlooking those by tagging any death metal that's remotely melodic as melodeath. The same goes for sludge metal. People seem to want to tag anything with a guitar tone that they deem to sound "sludgy" as sludge metal. Another example? "I hear a breakdown here. Must be metalcore then!" Is there actually any genuine hardcore influence though? Often the answer is no. I could go on & on & on about each genre in a similar manner but the moral of my story is that music doesn't just need to be "heavy" in order to qualify as metal in my opinion. It still needs to possess the attributes of the genres definition. If it possesses all of the key attributes of the hard rock definition but just happens to be heavy then it's simply a heavier example of hard rock. I don't think there's all that much of a grey area in the definitions. It's all in people's interpretations of them as a release either possesses the required attributes or it doesn't. If it possesses the attributes of both heavy metal & hard rock then a dual tagging is fine. There's no confusion there at all as far as I can see.
Actually, the comments detailing blurring comes from the internet's variety of tagging the albums in general. And Deep Purple, the so-called "metal gods," aren't the only ones part of this. Aside from the joke of the hair metal discussion, we still have people discussing, or even bickering, over whether or not Converge are too punk to be metal or too metal to be punk or both. And there's also the discussion concerning the early melodic metalcore works of Avenged Sevenfold. And these are only a couple of examples. The most analytical in years is the discussion on whether or not Death's Symbolic and The Sound of Perserverance are more thrash than death, which both Metallum and Metalstorm seem to have differing opinions toward. There are plenty of high-profile metal websites that have their own consensus concerning these things. So the blurred lines don't always stem from the uneducated but from those who've had their metal experiences defined by key albums in their histories. Not to mention, there's the historical relevance of some early examples of the next step towards heaviness, before the "metal structure" was formed but still during the time when metal was an applicable tag. And yes, we had some jokers tagging AC/DC as metal back then and we still do. But in the case of In Rock and AFD, we have multiple components being blended with the hard rock sound of both respective time periods. Thus, because of the blurred line and the subjectivity of heaviness, metal history may end up forgotten aside from naming certain albums "influential."
Aside from the joke of the hair metal discussion, we still have people discussing, or even bickering, over whether or not Converge are too punk to be metal or too metal to be punk or both.
Metal Archives seems to think it's the former.
Aside from the joke of the hair metal discussion, we still have people discussing, or even bickering, over whether or not Converge are too punk to be metal or too metal to be punk or both.
Metal Archives seems to think it's the former.
Believe me, much I what I say stems from the questionable behavior of Metal Archives.
I don't actually think Metal Archives' issues are related to a misguided understanding of what metal is. My impression is that the key players simply don't like certain genres & use their platform to try to warp people's impressions of them which is something that I'm very much opposed to.
With other platforms it comes down to education or the methodology for adding bands & releases to their site in my opinion. People need to stop believing everything they read on the internet because the ability to create & finance a website does not make someone (including me) any less ignorant. How else can you explain the argument Rex mentioned earlier whereby some people are tempted to link those last couple of Death albums to thrash?? Also, no administrator can possibly listen to every band/release before adding them to a database so you have to use something as a guide which leaves you open to the accuracy of that guide. We certainly experience that here at the Academy but thankfully we've developed a community & a platform that are more conducive to accurate outcomes than our competition which was kinda the point of creating the site in the first place.
And for the record, I wouldn't say that the hair metal argument is a joke. Many of those releases are a combination of metal & hard rock so there are examples that fall on either side of the equation or both.
I don't actually think Metal Archives' issues are related to a misguided understanding of what metal is. My impression is that the key players simply don't like certain genres & use their platform to try to warp people's impressions of them which is something that I'm very much opposed to.
With other platforms it comes down to education or the methodology for adding bands & releases to their site in my opinion. People need to stop believing everything they read on the internet because the ability to create & finance a website does not make someone (including me) any less ignorant. How else can you explain the argument Rex mentioned earlier whereby some people are tempted to link those last couple of Death albums to thrash?? Also, no administrator can possibly listen to every band/release before adding them to a database so you have to use something as a guide which leaves you open to the accuracy of that guide. We certainly experience that here at the Academy but thankfully we've developed a community & a platform that are more conducive to accurate outcomes than our competition which was kinda the point of creating the site in the first place.
And for the record, I wouldn't say that the hair metal argument is a joke. Many of those releases are a combination of metal & hard rock so there are examples that fall on either side of the equation or both.
I don't think it's so much "warping" as it is metal fanboy pretentiousness, you know overstrictness to what real metal is, and then (potentially hypocritically) adding Deep Purple while the "poser" band Avenged Sevenfold is left out to rot in the hot sun. The website seems to have it out for a lot of metalcore, but from what I've noticed it seems to be towards some more popular bands.
And yes, some hair metal albums are indeed true metal, notably Motley Crue and Dokken, but let's be honest: there are quite a few people who still confuse it with real metal. Apparently, Poison is metal... Apparently...
I don't think it's so much "warping" as it is metal fanboy pretentiousness, you know overstrictness to what real metal is, and then (potentially hypocritically) adding Deep Purple while the "poser" band Avenged Sevenfold is left out to rot in the hot sun. The website seems to have it out for a lot of metalcore, but from what I've noticed it seems to be towards some more popular bands.And yes, some hair metal albums are indeed true metal, notably Motley Crue and Dokken, but let's be honest: there are quite a few people who still confuse it with real metal. Apparently, Poison is metal... Apparently...
I can't blame anyone for thinking hair metal or glam metal is metal. Why else would it contain the word metal in it!? Stupid, dumb genre names... (grumble, grumble)... don't get me started on U.S. Power Metal which apparently isn't Power Metal. It would be surprising if people weren't confused!