Roots of Evil: The Origins of Metal

With the fiftieth anniversary of metal music around the corner, forthcoming years will witness an increase of publications dealing with the history, legacy and defining characteristics of the genre. This could finally resolve the lack of consensus that still exists regarding the definition and origins of heavy metal.

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King Crimson – Lark’s Tongues in Aspic (1973)

Heavy metal was born in very late 60s and early 70s as a merger of heavy rock, proto-punk, horror film scores and progressive rock, carving out a new form of dark music that spelled out longer phrases than rock by using moveable power chords in complex riffs.

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Ihsahn: “What I do now is musically still black metal.”

Ihsahn is recording his upcoming solo album right now in Norway according to Blabbermouth. Furthermore Ihsahn believes that black metal is not a specific type of heavy metal music but rather a mind set and that the random progressive rock and jazzy instrumental masturbation Ihsahn performs now is still actually “black metal” despite not even being metal music to begin with, yet alone black metal.

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Metal Is Not Rock

There remains a massive confusion in mainstream media, society, and culture regarding metal as a truly separate genre of music.  The mainstream media and leftist-controlled academia regard metal merely as a subgenre of rock music, rather than its own distinct genre. This is of course absurd. If metal isn’t its own entirely separate genre of music then jazz, folk, country, and blues are all rock ‘n’ roll too as they can all be played with the same basic set of modern instruments. Since this topic is well-documented in Death Metal Underground’s extensive Heavy Metal FAQ, in this article I will merely layout some basic musical differences between the genres and provide a few appropriate examples to hammer it down into the brains of the ignorant.

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Cóndor East Coast Tour

Acclaimed progressive rock and heavy/death metal band Cóndor are touring the east coast of the United Stated next month with techdeaf Morbid Angel worshipers Garroted. This will be a good chance for seasoned headbangers to check out an accomplished band with enough quality material to make for a great live set and an up-and-coming run of the mill band that can play their instruments. Garroted could potentially improve in the future if they compose their riffs into effective death metal mazes that progress forward instead of simply playing them one after the other.

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Rainbow Releases Two New Songs

Rainbow has just released two new recording songs for the first time in over two decades. “Land of Hope and Glory” is  Ritchie Blackmore reworking the traditional British song and the band also rerecorded their 1981 glam rock song “I Surrender” with their current vocalist, Ronnie Romero.

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Ancient – Trolltaar Reissue

Ancient‘s last hurrah, the Trolltaar EP, has been reissued by Sleaszy Rider Records with three bonus live tracks from 1993 according to the band’s Facebook page. Trolltaar saw Ancient develop cyclical simple Enslaved style riffs into extended black metal epics inspired by the virtuosity of longer 1970s popular progressive rock songs from Yes, Pink Floyd, Camel, and Led Zeppelin. Ancient were one of the few death or black metal bands inspired by popular rock music where the mass-market inspirations did not render them impotent as a metal band at least at first. Ancient, lacking a truly distinct riffing style of their own, eventually ran out of ideas and decided to play Hot Topic rock after Svartalvheim and Trolltaar but that is a topic for another time.

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