The Return of True Metal

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   http://www.examiner.com/metal-music-in-houston/the-return-of-true-metal

Brett Stevens, Houston Metal Music Examiner 
December 26, 2011 

Something
 interesting happened around 2003. At this point, the black metal 
community woke up and realized a couple of unsettling things.

First,
 they suddenly saw that since 1995, nothing much had been happening and 
the few good bands had been drowned out by a sea of imitators. Second, 
they recognized that what was replacing the "trve kvlt" black metal was a
 new form of music that mixed indie rock, shoegaze, emo, post-hardcore, 
and punk rock with black metal and death metal flavorings.

This 
was a counterpart to what happened in death metal around the year 2000 
when "metalcore," or technical hardcore with death metal stylings, 
effectively replaced death metal. We now call this "technical death 
metal" and "melodic death metal" but it has less in common with death 
metal than breakaway punk bands like Neurosis and Human Remains.

Starting
 a few years later, the "true metal" movement was born. It exists in 
several genres, but has grouped heavy metal and speed metal into power 
metal, pushed death metal and doom metal into the same genre, and in 
black metal, has barely manifested itself at all. As black metal is the 
most popular underground metal genre perhaps ever, it will be the last 
to fall.
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The press is even starting to notice.

Between
 revivals of classic heavy metal genres and iconic bands' reunion tours,
 it's clear that a love of tradition still runs deep in aggressive music
 culture. Metalheads are infamous for their Klingon-like loyalty to the 
bands and styles they love; many metal heads don't just let their 
musical tastes inform their listening habits, but everything from their 
style of dress to their social circles. In 2011, many bands sought to 
honour these hardcore fans with tours and albums that paid tribute to, 
and drew inspiration from, respected genre conventions. While still 
outside the mainstream, aggressive music now has the strength and power 
of a rich musical heritage all its own, and found success in celebrating
 that.

The year saw many significant bands reuniting, including 
the recent announcement that the original Black Sabbath line-up would be
 writing a new album together and embarking upon a world tour. Anthrax 
reunited with vocalist Joey Belladonna to record a new album, and 
thrash's Big Four (Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax) toured 
together for the first time in their mutual history.

Successful 
genre revivals, such as thrash and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, 
continued to thrive. Unlike other genres, metal is not trendy, and to 
delve into a particular style of metal means to invest in a vast 
back-catalogue as well as seek out new music. Fans of NWOBHM are just as
 likely to be listening to old Raven LPs as they are to be enjoying the 
latest 3 Inches of Blood release. Albums are valued by fans for how much
 they adhere to the conventions of these beloved genres; to say 
something sounds exactly like an early example is a form of praise.

It's
 not so much that true metal is a genre, but a label that bands are 
applying to their music to say that they are not part of the newer 
hybrid genre, and that they want to return to the spirit that produced 
the great music of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. The spirit is what 
allows bands to create music that carries the power of older metal, say 
fans, and many fans suggest that the newer music has lost that spirit 
because it's going in another direction. Whatever the case, the true 
metal movement is suggesting that metal isn't just a bunch of techniques
 and tropes, but a gestalt that ties them all together and communicates 
some kind of union with power and transcendence of the human condition, 
while more recent metal hybrids have been all about celebrating that 
human condition.

It should be exciting to watch this pan out.