Metal: The Most Misunderstood Genre

Journeying into my love for the extreme

Photo of Powerwolf by Sebastian Ervi on Pexels

Metal has played a huge part in my life, from understanding music, to dealing with trauma. This piece explores my journey into loving the extreme, and how it’s helped me navigate trying times. No eardrums were harmed in the writing of this piece!

Through detuned rambles and mental scribbles, I’ve been spinning this idea through my mind for the better part of the last few months, banging my head against the wall trying to figure out the best approach to this piece, without it sounding too generic.

Alas, I’ve decided to start from the beginning, and let my story, once again, play out.

I tuck you in, warm within, keep you free from sin ~ Enter Sandman, Metallica

Rattling within the walls of my home during the year 2005, I could hear Axel Rose whining amidst the kick drum and busy guitar riffs, followed shortly by a more familiar cry to turn the music down, emanating from the living room downstairs. With Dad out of the house for the week conducting important business on some other continent, Mom had to strive for peace and tranquility in the household alone.

With us boys aged 13 and 11 respectively, keeping things in order was already enough of a challenge, without the loud music taking over, and when Dad was in the house, at least things could be kept to a reasonable level. Mom, being an Audiologist was mostly looking out for our hearing, but I can’t imagine that she was too keen on some of the lyrical themes in some of Guns ’n Roses’ tracks then either!

As a family of musicians, exploration of genres was never truly frowned upon, however, as you might expect, due to explicit vocals and themes, some genres were heavily scrutinised and monitored more closely—rock and heavy metal in particular, and for a while things were kept under wraps.

But like most new things in life, particularly those frowned upon, the exposure takes place either through other people, or one’s own curiosity. In our case, a bit a both.

Make my heart beat again ~ Saturated Soul, Imminence

It was often that you could hear rock favourites piping through the corridors, from the sustained melodies of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd, to the ballads of Eric Clapton; the screeching guitar solos of Gary Moore, and the scale-jockey fiddling of Joe Satriani; the ‘Prince of Darkness’, Ozzy Osborne and his Crazy Train, and the unusual faces from KISS, and, last but not least, the downright weird and unusual from Frank Zappa.

I heard it all, and with my classical violin lessons teaching me more about J.Brahms, J.S. Bach, A.Vivaldi, S.Barber, and several more that I can’t be bothered to list, having something to weigh it back against really helped widen my horizons. I engaged a lot with the music I found in my father’s collection, looking into Latin music and African fusions too, I gravitated more towards your ballad/pop rock artists, you know, Queen and Bon Jovi, and did I spin “It’s My Life” till I was blue in the face.

My brother on the other hand, took a bit more of a crazy approach—he started learning to play the electric guitar and immersed himself in the more wicked-toned tracks.

Anecdotally, we had a family friend whom I’ll call ‘Big E’—not to be confused with Biggie (Smalls) from the hood; not because Big E wasn’t from a hood, he just wasn’t from the hood—who loved expressing his defiance and insurgence within his own home by listening to the most dark and insidious metal he could find. During my brother’s exploration into the genre, him and Big E would share notes and connect over bands and albums.

It lead to a lot of discourse in my relationship with the both of them, as I felt somewhat isolated in the friendship, and developed a ‘fear’ of some of the music my brother brought home with him. I’m talking about Lamb of God, Cradle of Filth, Black Label Society, Children of Bodom, and number of others with more hectic names.

I couldn’t believe that he would choose to listen to this. I didn’t get it. It was harsh on my eardrums and it, frankly, frightened me. I remember trying to understand; I did my best to connect with my brother by sitting in and listening, but would eventually get up and leave, particularly at the sight of some of the album covers.

With this being my only knowledge of the genre, it wasn’t until I found myself in conversation with a fellow school classmate, nicknamed Potter (who I admired from afar for his social skills and popularity, as he seemingly fused musical nerdiness, rebellious nature, and love for poetry into a facade full of charisma) that I learned that there was more to explore on the topic. He introduced me to His Infernal Majesty—no, not Harry and Lord Voldemort—a ‘love metal’ band racking up quite a following in the 2006/07’s.

A band harbouring a name like that, and tracks titled ‘Killing Loneliness’ and ‘Your Sweet 666’; I found myself challenged on a level that my young teenage self struggled to wrestle with. How could I listen to this? More so, should I listen to this? Can music be evil? Troubled, I soldiered on, because at the end of the day, I liked what I heard.

It wasn’t until maybe a year or so later, possibly longer, that I reached out to Big E and asked him to introduce me further to the genre. He and I, being similar in age, had often seen eye-to-eye and I recalled his response being “Well, what do you like?” and with my only point of reference being ‘love’ metal and not wanting to admit that openly, I told him to give me something unusual, relatable, but not too far afield.

Your tears don't fall, they crash around me ~ Tears Don’t Fall, Bullet for my Valentine

And from that description, he fed me Svartsot, a Danish folk metal band formed in 2005, that combined flutes and classical instrumentation with fried vocals and growling. I did my best to digest it. But alas, it was difficult to swallow.

It got me thinking though—if such a genre exists, what’s the chances that similar fusions would also, and given my affinity for violin and classical music, I eventually found, and quickly fell in love with, Apocalyptica, a Finnish symphonic metal band formed in 1993. Made up of just a couple dudes and their cellos, they covered most of Metallica’s famous works, as well as some of their own compositions.

Finally, something relatable. I learnt to play along and soon after, discovered the interconnected network of metal sub genres. This is where things got interesting. I found Nightwish (same country and genre), with tracks like “The Poet and the Pendulum” which told a 13 minute story, and “Last of the Wilds” which opens with a thunderstorm over a quay, before sounding a bit like pirate music.

That lead me to Alestorm, literally pirate metal, which really got my mind in a twist! What were these genres and how were they all connected? And once you start sliding, you pick up speed, which had me bouncing from the likes of Tenacious D to System of a Down, where lyrics fluctuated heavily from fighting Beezleboss (the Devil), to Chop Suey.

What the hell was this?

Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth ~ BYOB, System of a Down

Viking metal, power metal, doom metal, death, heavy, speed, folk, love, gothic, pirate, operatic, symphonic, instrumental, progressive, extreme… and suddenly I found myself looking through a web of sub genres, and their sub genres: Funeral doom, melododeath, goblin (yes, goblin), djent, and the list goes on.

Tell me another music genre that has more sub genres than metal… I’ll wait.

Was this what my brother and Big E had found? An endless blackhole of music to explore? There were even different vocal styles to choose from, each of which related to a certain category—clean, fried, screaming, growling, animal noises, polyphonic, nasal, ghoul and goblin—far outweighing anything I had discovered in the family music collection! Some tracks even featured combinations where the vocalist would seamlessly switch from one to another.

And it was here, in amongst all this that I found my respect for the genre. How many other artists out there were truly pushing the limits of their creativity? Letting it all out, not afraid of who might judge or what it might look like, just going for it. And it’s not just the dudes, I’ll point out that Evanescence, Arch Enemy, Nightwish, Eluveitie, Lethian Dreams, the new Linkin Park, Unleash the Archers, Babymetal, and several others are all lead female metal bands. It's incredible when you consider the vocal range and skill needed to achieve some of the growls and screams!

Now that I had scoped out the boundaries and what lay at the edge, I could hop between them and find my niche, it was bound to exist somewhere. My second love (after symphonic), was melodic death metal, with bands like In Flames and Soilwork, where I got a lot of musical melody (as the name suggests), with double-tap kick drums, and a mix between clean and screaming vocals. You could sing along if you knew the lyrics as the tracks are still pretty palatable at this level.

It wasn’t until my life took a bit of a nose dive that I started to explore the darker genres in more detail, in search for something relatable. When I found myself struggling, I realised that I could achieve mental peace through listening to something that, for lack of a better phrase, ‘understood me’, which led me to consuming more doom metal that I care to admit from bands such as Enshine, Swallow the Sun, Ocean of Grief, Aeonian Sorrow, and a personal favourite, Clouds.

I’ll be your guide, through these nightmares ~ Fields of Nothingness, Clouds

There was just something so invigorating about these tracks. The guitars aren’t comparatively impressive to some of the other metal genres as there are no solos, and the drums alternate between regular and double-kick; the real impression was made through the atmosphere, pacing, and emotion-tearing vocals. Tracks have a slow tempo build up, gentle breaks, sad lyrics, and often eerie piano or other classical instrumentation. What can start peaceful and inviting, with clean vocals, can change mid-verse into something dense and depressing.

Similar in musical beauty, I could add funeral doom, in particular, the ‘A Shadow of Memories’ album by Lethian Dreams. I’ve used it to fall asleep even, if you can believe that. The track, ‘You Say’, is played gently with soft-spoken female lyrics, over a decorated finger-picked clean guitar solo.

Wait wait… hold up, how can a genre called funeral doom be soft enough to sleep to? Well, herein lies the true beauty of metal—just because it has a harsh title, doesn’t mean that it has to have all the brutalist elements at the forefront. Generalising here, funeral doom tracks have nihilistic lyrics, with a sense of grief and sorrow being central to the style, giving it a dreamlike quality. The classification for metal isn’t exclusive to the instrumentation, but the overarching sense of the track and how each of the elements interact.

You say every end has a start. And fear will fall apart. ~ You Say, Lethian Dreams

With that all said and done, I want to swing the pendulum to the other side and take some time to explain the kind of emotion that listening to these intense tracks exude. Whilst some of them are in fact gentle in nature, with depressing lyrics, others are… an acquired taste. Dense and fleshed out, with crazy kick drums, thrashing cymbals and vocal-chord-ripping lyrics.

I didn’t think that I would grow to enjoy this kind of music, until I discovered Lorna Shore, late one night scrolling Instagram. What impressed me was the sheer skill and dedication that Will Ramos (the lead singer) has to endure in order to pull of some of these sounds. More so, in watching some of his videos on YouTube, he’s just a stand up guy that’s passionate about his craft, and this is something that resonates through his music.

A track of theirs in particular that I think ties these two phenomena together nicely is ‘Welcome Back, O’ Sleeping Dreamer’, that opens with 90s of symphony with a high-soaring opera singer, before dropping you right to the bottom of the abyss. A fusion of genres that delivers a hard-hitting experience that makes you truly appreciate the time, skill, and dedication of the musicians, to giving you something extraordinary.

What I experienced from listening to Will’s one-take performances was the uncovering of trapped emotion, fused into my muscles and bone structure. Hearing the intensity of his voice—I’d say lyrics, but frankly I can’t always follow them—and the emotion conveyed, I’d be able to release some of mine. I’d find myself occasionally with tears in my eyes, feeling as if the darkness was being pulled out of me, swept away by the music.

Of their recent work, my favourite is the Pain Remains Trilogy, a masterpiece consisting of three tracks that bleed into each other, played as a one-take recording. It has it all, from Will’s lyrical performance, the intonation and brilliance of the orchestral sounds with the main band, to the craft and stitching that piece it all together. I’d highly recommend it, if you can stomach it!

As you’ve seen a number of quotes by now, this one from the first track of the trilogy stands out to me the most, as for a long time I thought I’d lose my sense of self and what made me who I am, to the devastating trauma caused by my fight with cancer.

My journey into the extreme was in part an attempt to reconcile my trapped emotions and free myself from the hooks of my trauma. I’d also say, successfully too.

A world without you isn’t meant for me ~ Dancing Like Flames, Lorna Shore

Throughout the writing of this piece, and thinking about where it all started, I found myself wondering about whether my friends from each epoch of my life explored the genre for similar reasons, or whether it was something else that drew them in entirely. As with most art, it’s up to the interpretation of the viewer as to what they get out of it!

Either way, I want to add that for others who are struggling to navigate rough waters, exploring new ways of expression can really do wonders for emotional release. It doesn’t have to be metal, but speaking from experience, sometimes a scream-along does more for the body and mind than a karaoke-approved sing-along!

Metal is, after all, best enjoyed loud.

Thanks for tuning in! Here’s a few of my recent pieces you might enjoy:

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If you’d like to show your support, I won’t turn down a (virtual) coffee!

Till next time,

~M.