Metal - The definitive Guide is a large, heavy, rather well written book, covering 273 metal bands across genres and categories. Each of these 273 bands has an entry where you'll find the history and discography of the band in reasonable detail.

Entries vary in length - most bands get approximately 1½ pages and that seems in most cases to be fine. A few get as little as half a page and some of the major and/or historically important bands get substantially more. I have not bothered counting allocations, but Black Sabbath probably gets the most with a whopping 21 pages - which keeping in mind their importance to metal history seems fitting.

Each entry contains a discography listing official album releases with mention of release year, label and number and for most bands one or two photos has been included as well. Some entries are liberally sprinkled with lengthy quotes from various current and former band members.

The writing style is matter of fact, but not overly dry, although it is somewhat fact-dense. It is obvious that the author, Gary Sharpe-Young knows his stuff and that this is a serious effort, that quite a lot work has gone into.

273 bands is not a lot, when one thinks of the zillion and one bands out there. But you have to make the cut somewhere in order to make it a manageable book of a reasonable size. It is an impossible task and you are bound to disappoint as you can only fit so many entries into the book. Still, I must say that I think the authors succeed admirably here, the selection are very solid and covers the important bands in each category. It comes across as rather complete, balancing the historical and current scenes well and in this respect at least, deserving of the "Definitive guide" title. There are glaring omissions of course - but hey - I could probably not have done nearly as good a job myself, so who am I to complain?

The book is divided into chapters like Heavy metal, NWOBHM, US Trash Metal, UK Trash metal etc. While this approach in some way serves to place each band into a larger context, it is not always logical and can make using the book somewhat confusing as many bands could fit into more than one category and no cross-indexing is applied. As an example of this: while it is fitting that a band like Therion is listed in the special "Innovators" chapter, they could equally well be placed in the Symphonic Metal or Swedish Metal chapters.

This is a problem, because a book like this very much invite use as an encyclopaedia rather than a cover-to-cover read. And this organization of bands together with the total lack of any kind of alphabetical index what so ever, makes it unnecessary hard to use.

Each chapter starts with a short introduction of ½-1 page of length. This introduction attempts to give the reader an overview of the category and serves to tie the book together as a guide rather than an encyclopaedia. In my view this aspect of the book is by far the least successful, as you cannot really achieve much in so limited a space. I would have loved to see these introductions expanded to 5-10 times the length.

Another failing of this book is the lack of focus on the music. While the book does a very good job of telling the story of an album release with information on contributors, label issues etc., it often lacks information on the actual music and how each album differs from each other.

(Ever read the Classic Rock mag? They have a format where they go through a bands discography and labels albums in categories like "essential, good, fans only, avoid etc. While this has its own pitfalls, something along these lines would have made the book an absolute winner.)

Reading through my review I realize that I come across as rather critical and the reader could easily get the impression that I don't like this book. That is neither correct nor deserved. This is actually a very good book, compiled and written by somebody who knows his subject. I just feel that it, with a few improvements, could become so much more useful. Nevertheless, I can recommend it to everybody who enjoys reading about metal bands and metal music.


Isbn: 9781906002015
Author: Garry Sharpe-Young
Jawbone Press 2007