Urban Hat€monger ?

It wasn't used differently, you're looking at it from a 2014 perspective.
Back in the 70s those were the heaviest rock bands around and the term heavy metal was used to identify these bands.

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Isbjørn

I think I just got schooled, if I may use American street slang.

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Wpnfire

I don't know why we started focusing on why Priest is a NWOBHM band. I thought it was incredibly obvious; it's like disagreeing with slayer being a thrash band. Also Urban agrees with me so...

Anyway, we kind of got off topic about the point I was trying to make. I guess NWOBHM is shaky to refer to as an entire genre, so I guess I won't refer to NWOBHM as a genre anymore. I would also argue that referring to heavy metal as a particular genre of it, is also just as shaky

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Isbjørn

Judas Priest being a NWOBHM band isn't obvious to me. They predated the inception of the movement, and they didn't embrace the whole punky lo-fi/DYI aesthetic of other groups like Saxon, Venom, and early Maiden. But I'm going to be more careful to talk about NWOBHM now too, as the fear of getting schooled by hatemongers is ever present.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

That's because they were one of the lucky ones and managed to get signed before the whole punk thing happened. They didn't need to.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

Judas Priest 1978 Stained Class tour...


Judas Priest 1979 (Around the time NWOBHM broke) Killing Machine Tour


See the difference?

And there's the change of musical direction as well, out went the slower proggier songs and in came the much shorter faster commercial songs with razor sharp guitars, which is something that pretty much defined the difference between the early 70s metal and the NWOBHM as a whole.

That's why they're included.

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Trollheart

Yeah but it didn't. The NWOBHM broke around 1979 and carried on into about 82/83. Read my six-part (so far) treatise on it in ... where is it now ... was just looking at it a moment ago ... oh yeah. My journal.

Priest were definitely before the whole scene, so were Motorhead. Maiden came up right on the cusp, 79/80 as did Leppard and Saxon, though Saxon's first album pretty much bombed and they only really took off, on the wings of the NWOBHM, with 1980's "Wheels of steel". Many bands who surfaced around the time of the NWOBHM sank fairly quickly; it was a bit of a harrowing thing. Chaff falls away, wheat rises or whatever. Not to say all the bands who made it deserved to, any more than the ones who failed should not have been denied their chance to make it. But it was a tough time, something of a killing fields where new labels who often hadn't a clue had as much to do with some good bands not making it, and the triple tenets of talent, marketing and popularity through gigging were the cornerstones of any band's success, or lack of it, as the case may be.

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Forward To Death

It's basically just form of rock that branched out and became it's own separate genre. Kind of like how rock branched out from country, blues, and jazz in the 1950s. Even going back to the roots of rock (and metal) in the early 20th century through the foundation of rock, popular music was constantly becoming louder, faster, and more abrasive. That's how I'd describe heavy metal in comparison to rock 'n' roll.

Isbjørn

Yeah, but Urban seems to disagree.

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Urban Hat€monger ?

I'm not disagreeing.
I'm saying it's not as black & white as that.

There's just as much an argument for them being a part of it as there is for them not to be.

That's my point.

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