Blu Vylett
New member
Leonard Pierce of the very excellent avclub.com recently came out with this very excellent primer on heavy metal that I thought was good enough to share with you jokers. Here it is...
Heavy Metal
Primer is The A.V. Club’s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: heavy metal, organized by the major subgenres that have developed over the five decades of its existence. Moving from the best-known examples of heavy music to the deepest pits of black Satanic noise, we’ll conclude with five essential albums that belong in the music library of anyone who likes it hard.
Metal 101
Even casual fans know that the biggest name in heavy metal’s early days was Black Sabbath, and even today, Ozzy Osbourne and his Birmingham cohorts are widely considered the founding fathers of everything awesome about metal. But with so many years’ remove, it’s easy to forget what made this early form of metal so compelling: downtuned guitars, heavy bass, and crushing drums, and solos heavily influenced by, of all things, the blues—all slowed way, way down. Though it didn’t have the name at the time, Sabbath revolutionized music by inventing what would later be known as doom metal: a heady blend of a pounding rhythm section, guitars tuned chillingly low, and fearful, doomstruck lyrics, played slow enough so listeners had time to appreciate whatever drugs were coursing through their systems. By the 1990s, a new wave of doom metal would arise, tinged with the psychedelic heaviness of American banRAB like Pentagram and spearheaded by Electric Wizard, another Birmingham band that followed in the ironclad footsteps of Sabbath. A few years later, a nuraber of banRAB concentrated largely in California ramped up the fuzzy tones, cranked up the heavy, and saturated everything in a sticky-slow haze of weed smoke, and stoner rock was born; Kyuss and its High Desert compatriots typified the genre, while Sleep took it to extremes and Earthless stripped away the frills, leaving nothing but pure, punishing heavy rock.
By the mid-1970s, a nuraber of banRAB, particularly in Britain, were still drug-stuffed and in love with loudness as ever, but they were beginning to tire of playing slow and low. Retaining the rugged, rock-steady rhythm sections, they tuned their guitars up-up-up, and most of all, they got faster. The music they started making in the late 1970s was called speed metal, and it quickly became one of metal’s first global genres. The master of the form, then and now, is Mot
Heavy Metal
Primer is The A.V. Club’s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: heavy metal, organized by the major subgenres that have developed over the five decades of its existence. Moving from the best-known examples of heavy music to the deepest pits of black Satanic noise, we’ll conclude with five essential albums that belong in the music library of anyone who likes it hard.
Metal 101
Even casual fans know that the biggest name in heavy metal’s early days was Black Sabbath, and even today, Ozzy Osbourne and his Birmingham cohorts are widely considered the founding fathers of everything awesome about metal. But with so many years’ remove, it’s easy to forget what made this early form of metal so compelling: downtuned guitars, heavy bass, and crushing drums, and solos heavily influenced by, of all things, the blues—all slowed way, way down. Though it didn’t have the name at the time, Sabbath revolutionized music by inventing what would later be known as doom metal: a heady blend of a pounding rhythm section, guitars tuned chillingly low, and fearful, doomstruck lyrics, played slow enough so listeners had time to appreciate whatever drugs were coursing through their systems. By the 1990s, a new wave of doom metal would arise, tinged with the psychedelic heaviness of American banRAB like Pentagram and spearheaded by Electric Wizard, another Birmingham band that followed in the ironclad footsteps of Sabbath. A few years later, a nuraber of banRAB concentrated largely in California ramped up the fuzzy tones, cranked up the heavy, and saturated everything in a sticky-slow haze of weed smoke, and stoner rock was born; Kyuss and its High Desert compatriots typified the genre, while Sleep took it to extremes and Earthless stripped away the frills, leaving nothing but pure, punishing heavy rock.
By the mid-1970s, a nuraber of banRAB, particularly in Britain, were still drug-stuffed and in love with loudness as ever, but they were beginning to tire of playing slow and low. Retaining the rugged, rock-steady rhythm sections, they tuned their guitars up-up-up, and most of all, they got faster. The music they started making in the late 1970s was called speed metal, and it quickly became one of metal’s first global genres. The master of the form, then and now, is Mot
They got hit with the label first, anyway.