Tag: metal

Gigawatts of Steel and Flame: A Power Metal History

Aside: Many projects have been in-flight and nearing completing since we completed the library last year, and I'll absolutely update here when they're actually finished!

The same periodical disk-exchange club that led to me putting together "Most Likely to Rock: A Metal Overview" back in August of 2015 (honestly am a little gutted to realize it's been nine years) is still alive and kicking. A lot of our exchange rounds are free-form or have set themes, but for the second time in the history of the club I was tasked with doing a genre deep-dive. I chose to sink my teeth into Power Metal and learn a bit more about where it actually came from. A huge shout-out; Johan Pettersson's articles on the history of power metal over at deathmetal.org were an enormous resource both for choosing individual tracks as well as for building my mental framework for understanding how the arc of the evolution of the genre we now know as power metal. I highly encourage you to read his articles if you want the thorough analysis.

The intent of this playlist was to provide an abbreviated history of the genre of power metal told through 18 tracks spanning what I understood as the four major epochs of it's development (progenitors, the parallel development of 1st wave European power metal and early US power metal, the 2nd wave of power metal, and finally modern power metal). Due to the conceit of the club this project is restricted to the 80 minute play time of a standard CD-R disk, which means many many artists did not make the final cut, and yes, some amazing tracks had to be subbed out for shorter tracks to make room for more. As much as I love a good 10-minute-epic, they couldn't make the list.

Without further yammering, here's the goods. All the tracks can be listened to at the YouTube playlist linked below, and the lyrics and liner notes are available as a PDF. Note: While I have deep reservations about AI art displacing human artists, this is the sort of one-off goofy non-commercial personal project that it seems ideal for; the cover image was generated by Bing's image creator, the font used is "The Darkest Night" LJ Design Studios available for personal use on FontSpace. 

[PDF Booklet] [YouTube Playlist]

Most Likely to Rock - A Metal Overview

Some context is necessary here. Several of my friends have formed a sort of bi-weekly disc exchange program in the spirit of old painfully 90s mix-tapes. Each week we're either exchanging CDs or meeting to discuss the selections we've listened to. It's been fun so far, providing an excuse to discover new music. In addition it's required us to engage in focused listening and critically evaluate what we're hearing before the discussion. Typically they're curated around a broad theme like "travel", but this previous round turned into a genre-focused overview, with each member tackling a genre that they had more familiarity with. I'd gotten it into my head that I knew a decent amount about metal music, so I went with that idea. Various factors collided to delay the next meeting, meaning I had something like six weeks rather than two to compose my disc. This is good, because I discovered that I actually knew very little about metal going into this.

I ended up spending an solid chunk of time just determining when and how various sub-genres of metal evolved, as well as what distinguished them from their siblings. Sites like Map of Metal and Every Noise at Once provided an amazing starting point as well as a shot of motivation for the task. While this did result in a playlist, the more interesting (read: time intensive) products were the liner notes. For each track I wrote up a short paragraph or two about the genre, threw in the album cover, lyrics, and a list of other artists that fall into the same camp. It's worth noting that chronology was used as the organizing principle behind the playlist, so don't expect smooth transitions nor consistent tempos. The tracks were selected with three goals: provide exemplary tracks for the genres, be accessible for an audience who had never been interested in metal before, and above all fit within the 80 minute limit of a CD-R. I dropped a lot of amazing tracks to stay under the limit, and they were painful omissions, but the various metalheads I consulted with eventually agreed that it was a reasonable introduction.

Enough words, here's the goods.

Album Cover

Playlist (Google Docs)
Liner Notes (PDF)