In the category of Finnish melodic death metal, this is a special album for us Children of Bodom fans since the death of guitar legend and frontman Alexi Laiho ended any hopes of a reunion (or his later project continuing).

Long-time keyboardist Janne Wirman had the band Warmen as a side project during the Bodom years but the band had its own sound. Now reformed, it's got a very classic Bodom melodic death metal heavy sound. His brother plays guitar in the band as well. But extra special is getting Petri Lindroos on vocals, who fronted Norther for several years (another Bodom like band from Finland) and then became the singer and lead guitar player of the epic metal band Ensiferum when they needed a replacement.

Basically this is a bit of classic "Finnish Death Metal royalty", and their album Here for None that came out this year sounds like it could have been from 20 years ago. Here's my favorite track:

Hah, that's so true!

Stephan Forté is the lead guitar player from the "prog metal" (but more in the heavy sense, again like Symphony X) band Adagio, and an old favorite of mine.

Here is a killer song from his solo instrumental album...definitely recommended if you like Jeff Loomis, Michael Romeo, Marty Friedman, etc. type instrumental shred!

I love video game soundtracks, I listen to a wide variety from old 90's stuff to modern more orchestral/epic type stuff. Big fan of Grant Kirkhope material. Had not heard this Doom before, but definitely enjoy, love the heavy detuned guitar parts

Very nice! If you like that, you should definitely check out the rest of the Doom 2016 Soundtrack. Some more highlights:



This is probably the most iconic/well-known:



This one is good and heavy, too.





And some of my favorite video game music/covers?













Some of these old Nintendo songs went waaaaay harder than they had to. Also, is it any wonder I ended up getting into metal coming up on these tunes??? lol.

Question of the day - what percentage of a song has to be metal for the song/band/etc. to be considered metal???

With so many cross-influences and genre mixing and everything, there are songs that span a variety of styles and sounds that could fit under the metal umbrella. Where is the line for you? Any examples??


I personally feel that metal is a pretty dominant "flavor" so to speak, so even if there are many other ingredients, if you have a metal base it influences the whole dish, like a tomato based dish etc.

I think the line lets blurriest between metal and rock since they share so much common background, and especially since mainstream rock has shifted much heavier than it used to be and is very similar to metal these days.

Bands who blur or walk the line, to me: Alice in Chains (specifically and especially the Dirt album as mentioned in the beginning of this thread), Disturbed, and controversially (or perhaps not) - Metallica, who are responsible for some of the best metal and rock albums of my life so far.

I would say there were two types of "glam metal" in the 80's. Stuff like early Crue, Dokken, and Ratt were the "harder" side of that, definitely more "metal" inspired. Later bands like Poison and particularly a bunch of the really pop late 80's groups that were getting terribly derivative may have looked glam, but they weren't remotely in the category of these earlier bands I mentioned that really pioneered that era. Not very "metal" for the most part.

Those earlier bands (Crue/Ratt/Dokken type) had plenty of their own influences, but the core DNA comes from 2 main groups: Van Halen and Judas Priest. Priest more so from the hard riffing song structures and guitar tone. Van Halen more so from the lead guitar playing, EVH created the blueprint for that era. I would say the Priest influence is the "metal" inspired part of that era, and Priest is undoubtedly a metal band (though even there, it was an evolution through the 70's to get to THE heavy Priest sound).

Van Halen has never been metal, even though again per above I think they had a big impact on 80's hard rock/glam metal. Van Halen's first album dropped in 1978, and while the guitar lead technique was jaw dropping, and Ed's rhythm playing was equally brilliant, he was never happy to just pound out power chords like a lot of metal players. And I would also argue 1981's Fair Warning was the last of the really hard rocking albums, Diver Down was kind of quirky with a lot of covers and the keyboards were kicked into high gear on 1984. So I think Van Halen at their peak was an earlier phenomenon, and even though they kept putting out albums throughout the decade, they shouldn't really get grouped with those other bands.

The true "peer comparison" to me for Van Halen is Randy Rhoads era Ozzy. Randy came up through the same scene as Ed, a similar major early innovator in lead guitar technique, but somehow in the context of Ozzy, hard to call those two albums (Blizzard of Ozz from 1980 and Diary of a Madman from 1981) anything else but metal.

Let's also contrast say Def Leppard and Iron Maiden, both technically considered part of NWOBHM early on. If you take both their respective albums from 1980 and 1981 (On Through the Night/High 'n Dry for Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Killers for Maiden), they don't sound massively different genre-wise, though Def Leppard was already getting some guff for "Hello America". But for the most part both bands were musically pretty straight forward hard rockers at that point. Of course Maiden then went on to make some of the most legendary and undoubtedly "metal" albums ever in the immediate years that followed. Def Leppard went much more mainstream, and while Pyromania still rocked pretty hard, hard to call that "metal" in the purest sense. And of course Hysteria went significantly even more pop.

And honestly, how I remember the decade was that the "metal" label was not consistently used. A Van Halen usually did not get called metal, a Metallica or Maiden usually did, and a Dokken or Ratt might get called hard rock or metal depending on the day. We didn't even care about the "glam" label so much, if we thought a band was more image than music we just called them "poseurs".