Septicflesh's "The Ophidian Wheel" and "A Fallen Temple" should be in The Fallen

Even though Gothic Metal is not on the top of both albums' RYM genre lists, a couple songs from each album sound more gothic than death metal (male/female singing, less or no death growling, less aggressive riffing, symphonic keyboards - "Phallic Litanies" and "The Eldest Cosmonaut"; or just almost entirely symphonic - "Tartarus" and the harrowing "Underworld" suite). Well sure you can call these two albums death metal, but don't expect them to have a lot of the original style like Morbid Angel, Obituary, or Deicide. With all those reasons, I'm suggesting adding "The Ophidian Wheel" and "A Fallen Temple" to The Fallen, while keeping their existing position in The Horde and The Guardians.

Update: Request cancelled for new submission.

I won't comment on your request as I don't want to sway anyone's judgement one way or another, but I do want to state that I don't feel Septic Flesh (they will always be Septic Flesh to me, regardless of their recent change to Septicflesh) should be in The Guardians. Similar to the way Fleshgod Apocalypse should not in any way sit alongside Iron Maiden and Helloween, Septic Flesh just don't fit there.

This highlights the problem I have with the Symphonic Metal genre. Genres should be used to describe a style of music and not necessarily relate to the use of a particular technique or instrument. Nightwish, Epica and After Forever have what I consider to be the Symphonic Metal sound. Death Metal that utilises symphonic aspects does not in any way resemble that sound.

We don't call Emperor Symphonic Metal because we have a genre called Symphonic Black Metal, which I should point out is a subgenre of Black Metal and not Symphonic Metal. If we had a subgenre called Symphonic Death Metal, then I'm certain that Fleshgod Apocalypse and Septic Flesh would sit comfortably within it, and once again it would not be a subgenre of Symphonic Metal.

Before I consider adding these releases to the Hall of Judgement, does anyone share this view? Does anyone disagree with it? I'd be very happy to discuss as it's bothered me for a while. Would anyone not find it weird if Fleshgod Apocalypse's Agony album was in the top 10 Guardian releases (it never would be, but I'm sure you get my point)?

I completely agree with your thoughts here Ben. I'd suggest that we just make a group decision to omit these symphonic death metal releases from The Guardians on a case by case basis. I see no reason that we should stick with anyone else's categorizations.

I agree too, Ben. However, some other websites don't. For example, Wikipedia has enough sources that say genres like symphonic black metal and symphonic death metal are subgenres of symphonic metal as much as black metal or death metal, and they stay in the symphonic metal article, "so a user looking for variants of symphonic metal will find them within the article about symphonic metal." But I respect your thoughts and prefer NOT to start a great debate with other sites about what counts as symphonic metal. Also I cancelled this request for a new submission.

We could possibly run into the same problem with other subgenres like neoclassical metal too. I mean I'm sure there's probably a few neoclassical goregrind exponents out there. Not to mention the fact that we've already accepted this exact problem with progressive metal but seem to just overlook it completely.

At the end of the day we just need to go with what's most likely & the most likely people to like symphonic metal are also into power metal & neoclassical metal. We should treat the exceptions like... well... exceptions. As far as the ongoing clan categorization of symphonic death metal releases go, I'd suggest that we just keep them under The Horde & continue to add future releases there when they have both symphonic metal & death metal as primaries. I think we should also make the call that The Guardians is to be kept extreme metal free. I think it should be. It's intended for fans of more traditional, melodic styles of metal.

Totally agreed.

Neoclassical goregrind!?! Didn't realize that's a thing...