Quote:
Originally Posted by Trollheart
Okay. So another word for melodic death metal would then be melodic metal? But I have heard albums described as mdm which, when listened to, were much closer to what I would think of as DM. This one is not: other than the odd screeched vocal and a few banging riffs, it has, as you say, about as much to do with Death Metal of any stripe as, oh I don't know, Kesha does.
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Think of melodic death metal sort of like a devolution of death metal back to a modernized version of NWOBHM (roughly speaking). You had Carcass and At the Gates, two death metal bands, slowly getting more and more melodic with each release until they finally dropped
Heartwork and
Slaughter of the Soul (along with the preceding
Terminal Spirit Disease EP) and sort of created the cutoff point. I'll throw Amorphis in there too with
Tales from the Thousand Lakes. I'm sure someone more versed in the genre could give you a more in-depth intro but that's good enough I suppose.
Around the same time plus a year or two you had some other bands that were crossing the line even further like In Flames, Dark Tranquility, and Hypocrisy. In those days (mid-90s) those bands were going even further away from death metal with a sort of "turbo-charged Iron Maiden" sound (in the words of Kerry King) that was much more slick, contained little
true extreme metal besides extreme-ish vocals. Some of it was even kissing cousins to power metal tbh. I honestly think you'd eat up Dark Tranquility.
In Flames are worth their own paragraph as once they got going they basically dragged melodic death metal with them as far as where the style would end up when it became "mainstream", and so you can almost use them all by themselves to show what happened to the genre.
After that I guess you can remember whatever melodic death metal you've heard from after the early 2000s and compare. The genre didn't do much after that and became a stagnant formula for European bands who I guess figured they could make money off of it. Know Soilwork? That.
TLDR: Just remember that time you heard
Heartwork and then pay attention to the In Flames section and you'll hear all you need to know. Do with this post what you will, but hopefully it'll clear some things up.