Certif1ed

Because there is a severe lack of counter arguments, looks like I'll have to provide them myself;

Motorhead

How can this band define metal?

Can you think of a band that sounds like Motorhead?

Neither can I.

How can a band define a genre, if it only sounds like itself, and no-one else has bothered to copy their style?

Motorhead's style hardly typifies the honking scooped midrange A - C6 based rifferama so repetitively and predictably employed by just about everyone else, from Priest to Ozzy to Saxon to Dio - everyone. Except Motorhead.

There are no passages crammed to bursting with tritones, sludgy, doomy riffs, or tremolo 16th thrash - come to think of it, there's almost no phrygian mode in the soloing - it's practically 100% pentatonic!

You could describe Motorhead's music as the heaviest expression of the Blues - or even Rock and Roll - and I'm sure Lemmy would NOT disagree - far from it, he would probably agree with pride.


Dio

When I think of metal, I don't think of some corporate machine replete with shiny MTV video.

Admittedly, fantasy stuff populated with 30ft laser-eyed dragons and suchlike is part of the stereotype image I have of the genre - but most metal bands I saw and enjoyed at the time of the NWoBHM (and since) had less lavish stage shows, yet still conveyed this imagery - where applicable.

Dio are more like Spinal Tap in this - in fact, Spinal Tap are probably more what I would think of as a Heavy Metal band; Very ordinary guys with loud guitars, pretentious beyond belief, deicated to the music so much that they don't even realise that they are not the most amazing musicians in the world, Marshalls that go to 11, needlessly long guitar solos, and stage props that never work.

Like I said earlier, Dio are a bit of a conundrum - they shouldn't really define Heavy Metal, but somehow they just do. It's really difficult to find a convincing argument against - yet thanks to their "more pretentious than thou" image, they're just not "it".



Next post;

Saxon vs Holocaust

You can't really find two more down to earth and genre-typifiying bands than these, so I'm psyching myself up by having these two on continuous loop all day.