About Power/Heavy being stale:

Keep in mind that it is only my opinion (and probably biased by the fact that I'm a fan of extreme Metal and don't care for Powermetal or traditional Heavy Metal). In no way do I pretend to 'know'. I'm just advancing a hypothesis.

What I think is the simplier, more basic musically a genre is, the more it will have a tendency to stagnate as time goes by. Why? Because the more basic music is, the less space it has for innovation. Think of it as a 'saturation threshold'. With genres that range from very slow to extremely fast, I believe it leaves more space for tempo changes, incorporating different song structures and even different parts in the same song, different sounds. A possibility to incorporate more different riffs and other guitarwork and varied drumming, etc. If used efficiently, with good songwriting abilities, you have more room than in a genre like Powermetal in which you never play too fast, riffs are not supposed to be too Thrashy, drums don't blast, it must not sound too raw, etc. A genre like that will reach saturation earlier because it gets harder and harder to innovate since there is not enough room for it, as it is so trapped in a few strict gimmicks. After a while, pretty much everything has been done.

Also, in more extreme genres, there are more opportunities for different vocal styles. Some genres don't use (or almost never use) harsh vocals, for example. In Powermetal, it's almost always the high-pitched clean vocals, interchangeable from one band to another. Of course, harsh vocals are predominant in extreme genres but some bands also use more normal vocals in the mix or combinations of screams and growls, etc.

Of course, this theory has its flaws. For example, Death Metal can be very complex and technical, yet it is a very stale genre in general these days.

As for traditional Heavy Metal, I think it was the starting point but since Metal has changed so much since its early days and branched in every direction, it is almost impossible to innovate in this genre without it becoming something else that would belong to one of the more 'specialized' genres (Powermetal, Thrash, etc, etc...).

There are Europiean flower metal as Helloween, Freedom Call and US Power as Iced earth, this band Jag panzer and so on what is good
There are only one metal gods , all lads comr from Birmingham
BTW I know this band good one, I will check this album out

Written by deadone on 30.07.2015 at 02:29


I agree to some degree but I think the real issue is that power metal market now expects sugary over melodic, overpolished Helloween clone tracks. Some of it's nostalgia, some of it's profit driven (ie easy money) and some of it's the fans themselves (aka market expectations).

And modern fans of traditional genres seem very averse to change. You certainly couldn't release a Black album in 2015!

So the limits are self-imposed. The genre itself is open to anything if bands are willing to try it. Indeed in the mid-late1990s Helloween went out and got heavier and even played "non-power metal" style riffs on Better Than Raw. Bands like Tad Morose, Angel Dust, Blind Guardian or Iced Earth and even Nevermore just did their own thing, unrestricted by what the rest of the traditional metal world was doing.

I think the other problem is that the scene is dominated by Europeans where metal is more acceptable than the US and has as such been defanged compared to say US where they still burn rock n roll albums in some states. Indeed there's been a convergence between European metal and mainstream pop music be it bands like Sonata Artctica, Within Temptation and Nightwish or even bands like In Flames.

Since around the millenia, Powermetal is straying away more and more from 'melodic speed Metal' and has a tendency to lean more towards hard rock and pop music, indeed. It is less and less Metal and more mainstream. Not that I care these days. We have other genres, if we want more Metal stuff.