Metal Reviews

I think I've come up with the perfect way to tag genre's for itunes without being redundant, too many genre's or any other problems:


Alternative Metal - includes Nu-metal, Grunge, modern metal
**Examples - White Zombie, Alice In Chains, Godsmack, Mudvayne, Incubus, Dope, Tool, Stuck Mojo

Classic Metal - Old school metal
**Examples - angel witch, diamond head, venom, BOC, black sabbath, rainbow, dio, helloween, saxon

European Metal - any genre that utilizes extreme metal styles with hard emphasis on melody, or don't fit into power or prog metal and use a lot of melodic leads
**examples - finntroll, serenity, In flames, children of bodom, persuader, catamenia, stratovarius,

Extreme Metal - death metal, black metal, grindcore
**examples - death, emperor, mayhem, akercocke, obitary, six feet under

Hard Rock - AOR and Led Zeppelin derived bands, includes hair metal
**examples - Boston, extreme, def leppard, kansas, led zeppelin, alcatrazz, yngwie malmsteen, rush, van halen, skid row, ozzy, living colour

Heavy Metal - Black sabbath derived metal, speed metal, other shit that sounds like classic heavy metal but is not too genre specific
**exmaples - king diamond, mercyful fate, Iced earth, pantera, tarot, nevermore, danzig

Popular Rock - Includes certain punk bands, new wave, R&B, pop,
**examples - falco, chicago, the alarm, big country, the skids

Power Metal - non ultra-progressive power metal
**examples - axenstar, burning point, firewind, dremaland, hammerfall, freedom call, majesty, edguy, nocturnal rites, mystic prophecy, sinergy, wizard

Progressive Metal - including ultra-progressive power metal, could be called rush-derived bands but heavy
**examples - kamelot, symphony x, vision divine, evergrey, fates warning, angra, crimson glory, queensryche, eldritch, threshold, tribuzy

Progressive Rock - old school prog rock
**exampes - genesis, yes, king crimson, marillion

Thrash Metal - thrash!
**examples - kreator, metallica, biohazard, prong, slayer, testament, metal church, death angel, communic, heathen

Top 40 - a special category for groups of any non-metal genre that i only have a handful of songs from, so it plays like on huge ass compilation cd.

Of course, if i listened to punk, guitar shredders and other specific genres, id have to make a new genre, but now, there's only one group that doesn't fit in thier genre...samhain, whcih goes in heavy metal, like danzig.

fag

I guess that could help with the metal i have, my genre tags a all over the shop.

thanks.

although i do have a heap of other genres, and im not putting them as top 40, cause thats a tad stupid and narrow minded. not all non-metal is top 40

In the context of my collection, they were all from the billboard top 100 list of thier perspective year, that should have been explained. Most of the non-metal I listen to is very narrow and fits nicely together any how. I can see how that doesn't work for others though.

I don't really need tags. I know what the bands i listen to play and in what specific genre they belong.

I use WMP instead of Itunes and I just name a band as it is. It may be easier on WMP because you can use a semi-colon to declare two different genres, but I don't know if you can do that on Itunes.

I tried that once, but everything seems to get lost in the shuffle. I would buy about 10 albums a week and listen to about 1 every two weeks and would forget why I bought the shit to begin with. So this system helps me narrow down the bands depending on what mood i'm in.

I adapted this sytem from the one I used on winamp (which i am on a mac and can't use now.) Which involved using smart playlists. Other idiosynchratic nonsense that my files have:

composer: used to rate songs (star ratings suck, I use 1.0-10.0 and If the song is innaplicable to the album's ratings I can put it in paranthesis)

BPM: used for the albums rating, but with the decimals gone, so a 9.99 is simply 999. There's no such thing as an album that is a 10 as far as I know. (Power Windows has the highest at 9.88)

Grouping - country of origin, city and state specific within the US and canada

I've also found that albums have to be named in this format to display properly at all times: 1990 - 01. Facelift (the year, the order it was released for that artist - that year, and album name)

I tried to sort bands into genres depending on what I was in the mood for but then gave up

I know you're goofing on me, but I can see why, Its fucking hard! It took me a couple of years of trial and error.

...waiting for some weird band to come along and fuck it all up!

Yeah man, Soulcrusher, Make Them Die Slowly, and La Sexorcisto just scream Nu-Metal. Astro-Creep wouldn't even fit under that tag. Jeeze, you're just a bastion of music knowledge, aren't you. Oh, and labeling Alice in Chains Nu-Metal as well, even though they toured with and are respected by real Metal bands? You're an idiot. Facelift and Dirt are udeniably Metal albums, dumbass. Even the Metal-Archives agrees.

To be fair, he listed both those bands under "Alternative metal (includes Grunge, Nu-metal)"

I actually did try but then there were too many bands that would fall in between two classifications, I wish iTunes did genres as a tagging system so I could have put them under both, the I probably wouldn't have given up >.<

I think the genres I used were doom, death, black, melodeath, metalcore, instrumental, trad metal, and rock. might have had a separate classification for thrash too :o

As I've mentioned Ad Nauseum, the music industry uses the term "alternative metal" for anything that is not typical heavy metal. Go to allmusic.com and see how much this term is thrown around before you accuse me of being ill-informed. I'm quite informed on the matter, you are the one who doesn't knw the instrustry venacular. Besides, I'm not facilitating certain bands "uniqueness" and giving them thier own genre because that would be insane and useless.

you can, but it would be kinda hard, you'd have to create "smart playlsts" and use the flag "does not contain" and list the genre's the band does not fall into.

See, someone can read. Grunge, Nu-Metal, Industrial Metal, rap-metal, are all called "alternative metal" as far the music industry is concerned. It is a popular term used in press releases to show that a certain band is marketed to the mainstream fad that were these forms of music in the last 15 years, as opposed to fans of more traditional heavy metal that are likely not to care about these forms of music. the term simply doesn't mean "nu-metal" as it has been implied, nor does it have the narrow indications that the word "alternative" had in the mid-nineties. To beat the dead horse some more, if it sounds somewhat unique and doesn't fit into the venacular of traditional metal genre's, the industry considers it "alternative metal." Yes. That means back in 1970, Black sabbath were an alternative band because "heavy metal" hadn't really been invented yet, and they were such a departure from the popular music scene at the time. get it yet?

I don't give two shits about "Industry Vernacular", which means terms thrown around by a bunch of white men in suits who have never even heard the band. Alice in Chains isn't even all that "Grungy".

Exactly. But don't say I'm wrong because you disagree.

Why can't you just call old Zombie noise or AinC alt metal and grunge or Akercocke progressive and death metal?

On my wmp, Sigh is labeled as "Black; Avant garde" and AinC is "Grunge; Alternative Metal" and Behemoth is labeled "Death" or "Black" or "Blackened Death" depending on the album. Why don't you just do that instead of pushing everything into 6 or so labels?

Like half of the discussion in this forum comes from arguing over genres so don't kill it...