Originally Posted by skinnymofo

and one final question to those that are into the screaming while growling your voice into something you cant understand. Do you guys tone out the sing...screaming guy and just get into the killer riffs and beats or is it un metal to say, sing along or follow along with the words.

Originally Posted by Suave

Black metal - dark and instrumental.

Death metal - they really love the whole deep, guttural, I-think-my-larynx-is-destroying-itself kind of singing. Also dark.

Thrash metal - fast, dark metal.

Doom metal - uh, dark and sorrowful?

I personally prefer to avoid any metal that has a prefix, as they all seem to involve the whole "dark" adjective, and in my opinion, could also include "crappy" and "depressing". And it's not like I haven't given it a chance. I've been exposed to TONS of it thanks to some of my highschool friends as well as some of my co-workers.

Originally Posted by K-Wise

Yeah I can't really get into the guys that scream their lyrics to the point where you can't understand a word they're saying...I like very few bands who do that. Especially the ones who's singers actually have a great tone and quality to their normal singing voice yet feel the need to scream things you can hardly understand. I don't equate screaming your lungs out with grotesque lyrics of a morbid or satanic nature and tuning your guitars so low it's almost no longer musical with my definition of heavy metal...to me heavy is Led Zepplin...heavy is Rush 2112 Overture...shit like that. It's the emotion of your voice and playing that makes it heavy not screaming nasty things and playing as fast as you can....David Gilmour is heavier than any single one of these metal bands even when he's writing spiritual stuff. Some people love it though...to each his own.

Asta!!

Originally Posted by n0nsensical

Well it's all really subjective, and many an internet flame war has been waged over the genre of a band. It's a fine line between some of them and everyone seems to have their own definition. So with tongue partially in cheek, I will explain what I've come up with.

Death metal bands always have names relating to corpses, body parts, death, etc., like Cannibal Corpse, Cattle Decapitation, Napalm Death...if the name sounds scary and funny at the same time, it's probably a death band. They have the usual screaming unintelligible vocals and a musical focus on being loud.

Doom metal vocals tend to be more raspy than the screaming of death metal. Also characterized by slower rhythms and minor keys. I'm not too familiar specific bands of this genre.

Goth metal is related to doom metal. Often involves anti-Christian lyrics and the other usual things you might associate with goth culture. Tristania and Sins of Thy Beloved can be characterized as goth metal.

Progressive metal is what you get when you take 70s prog rock bands like Rush and Yes and add a generous helping of metal. Usually have very complex songs, multiple time signatures, crazy solos, all that good stuff. Lots of musical virtuosity. Most MTV viewers can't process so much musical ability at once. The vocals are normal singing, and the vocalists tend to have very large ranges focusing on the higher end. Dream Theater is always the archetypical example, Symphony X and Fates Warning are also other examples.

Power metal, you could say, is an evolution of 80s metal bands like Iron Maiden. It usually has infectious melodies, and compared to the dark subjects of death and doom metal, power metal is usually much more cheerful and uplifting. Stratovarius, Hammerfall, Rhapsody, and Sonata Arctica are good examples. Vocals are clean and on the high end like prog metal. Fantasy is common subject matter: Dragons, Kings, and Elves all have their parts in power metal, and these bands are known to make songs about J.R.R. Tolkien books (and even whole albums, like in the case of Blind Guardian's Nightfall in Middle-Earth). It's obscure in North America even for metal, far more popular in Europe and South America, and most of the well-known bands are European.

Melodic death metal is a subgenre also related to power metal, the music usually is (surprise) more melodic and the vocals more intelligible, but still in the "death" style. Examples are In Flames, Opeth, and Children of Bodom. Like power metal, it's more popular in Europe, but it does have its following here.