Gothic metal

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Gothic metal

Development phase: early 1990s
Place of origin: Great Britain · Scandinavia
Stylistic precursors
Death Doom · Black Metal · neoclassical · Gothic Rock
Pioneers
Paradise Lost · Tiamat · My Dying Bride
Instruments typical of the genre
Electric guitar · Electric bass · Drums · Keyboard
Stylistic successor
Dark Rock · Dark Metal

Gothic Metal [ ˈɡɒθɪk ˈmɛtl ] is a style of music that emerged in the first half of the 1990s through the mutual influence of the genres Metal and Dark Wave . However, the initiators of the genre are mainly rooted in the metal environment.

Here Gothic Metal appears as a vague style name, especially in the course of stylistic development, since the use of the term went beyond the genre. This was expressed in particular by the fact that some of the representatives assigned to the term stylistically tended more towards Gothic Rock, while other artists, on the other hand, had a predominance of metal (e.g. growling ). Other groups collected under the term corresponded more to alternative metal or hybrid ways of playing between metal and the black scene.

Gothic Metal is the first style of music that, within its short-term popularity, brought the two (initially considered incompatible) scenes Metal and Gothic closer together both stylistically and subculturally in the 1990s. In this function, Gothic Metal made a significant contribution to bringing the black scene closer to other metal styles.

Musical classification

The style that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s mixes Death Metal, known as Death Doom and reduced in tempo, with stylistic elements of Gothic Rock and Neoclassical to form an independent genre. Essential components from the field of metal are seen here as a time-reduced, strongly distorted guitar playing and deep growling . The elements that are close to the dark wave vary between the "angelic singing of a woman", the use of a violin, a keyboard or plaintive, clean singing.

history

Thought leader

In 1987 the Swiss band Celtic Frost combined metal with a classic singer who was reminiscent of Christian Death on the album Into the Pandemonium . Danzig , the gloomy rock debut of the ex- Misfits singer Glenn Danzig , the album Nosferatu by the group Helstar , A Conflict of Hatred by Warfare and the album Sex & Drugs & Jesus Christ by Christian Death already showed the way in 1988, which later showed bands should walk under the collective term Gothic Metal . At about the same time and similarly influential, the work of the Gothic-Rock formation Fields of the Nephilim , named by bands like Moonspell or Tiamat as an influence.

origin

Co-founder of Gothic Metal: My Dying Brides singer Aaron Stainthorpe

In particular, the English doom and death metal underground of the early 1990s emerged as the origin of the music genre. The starting shot was given by Paradise Lost , who already began in 1991 with their heavy music on the eponymous album Gothic, sometimes referred to as "Slow Death", which at that time was still called Doom or Death Metal due to the lack of a generally valid genre name not only to accompany with keyboards, but also to combine them with clear, feminine vocal passages. Major influences were formed by groups such as The Sisters of Mercy and Dead Can Dance , but also Celtic Frost .

"We heard Celtic Frost's Into Pandemonium [sic!] And Morbid Tales , and they were using orchestrations on metal music, and we thought that was cool to take it in another direction."

"We heard Celtic Frost's Into Pandemonium [sic!] And Morbid Tales , they used orchestration in Metal and we thought it would be cool to take this idea in a different direction."

- Koerber, Scott: An Eternal Classic . The Making of Paradise Lost's Gothic .

In the same year Tiamat brought further fundamental elements into the music with The Astral Sleep and My Dying Bride with Symphonaire Infernus et Spera Empyrium . The melancholy mood of the music and the density of the arrangements were groundbreaking for later bands. In addition, instruments atypical for Death and Doom Metal flowed into the music, especially through the violin used by My Dying Bride.

Formation of your own genre

From this point on, various bands experimented with the newly discovered possibilities or switched completely to the new style of music. From 1993 to around 1997 a plethora of albums and new bands appeared. In particular, these came from the Scandinavian region , but there were also artists such as Anathema from England or the formation Celestial Season from the Netherlands , who built the bridge between Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride in 1993 with Forever Scarlet Passion and those for their single Flowerskin whole song passages of Dead Can Dance KRIWET sampled . Meanwhile, Tiamat worked on the Pink Floyd- inspired concept album Wildhoney in 1994 . Theater of Tragedy perfected the alternating vocals between deep male growls and female soprano singing that emerged in Paradise Lost by permanently presenting it as a band and aligning the songwriting throughout with it. The 3rd and the Mortal were the first to try in 1993 to omit male vocals entirely, whereas Pyogenesis successfully made a change between rough and clear male vocals their trademark in 1992. The style set by The 3rd and the Mortal was continued by Avrigus , Gray November , Cult of Heroidas and Lethian Dreams , among others , while that of Pyogenesis was continued by groups such as Angellore and Plateau Sigma . My Dying Bride coined 1993 with Turn Loose the Swans a Gothic Metal with plaintive and suffering vocals, which was partly taken up by groups like Deinonychus and later Fatum Elisum or Vanha . The action brought by Theater of Tragedy to the stereotype of gothic metal exchange vocal pairing of growling and soprano singing was, however, as a beauty-and-the-Beast -Gesang known and of groups such as The Slow Death , Lelantos , Funeral , Consummatum Est , Tristania or Draconian continued .

Persistence of the genre

After a short period of popularity of the style, which favored the mutual influence of black scene and metal, the interest in Gothic Metal ebbed and more mass-compatible hybrid metal styles took the place of the genre. Gothic Metal, however, stayed underground all the time. Groups like Paramaecium , Scheitan , Officium Triste , Substance for God or Furbowl could hardly attract the attention of earlier performers early on after the genre's high phase. With bands like Fatum Elisum, Angellore, The Fall of Every Season , Fallen , The Maledict or Murkrat , the genre was continued in its different styles despite little attention. Some of the original initiators and early representatives of the genre, such as Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Tiamat, returned to Gothic Metal.

As a collective term

In addition to the genre term, the term Gothic Metal is also generally applied to the musical and socio-cultural crossover between Metal and the music of the black scene , whereby interpreters of independent musical styles such as symphonic metal , dark rock , dark metal and alternative metal are sometimes referred to as Gothic Metal.

Influence and use as a collective term

The burgeoning success of the genre favored the crossover of different musical styles of the dark wave spectrum with that of all metal in both the metal scene and the black scene . Between 1993 and 1996 several albums were created on which bands and artists, both from dark wave and gothic rock as well as from various areas of the metal environment, showed a tendency towards mutual crossovers .

A number of bands, like Lake of Tears , worked out a toned down, more melodic variant of the rough male vocals of Gothic Metal, which is often painful and yet powerful. This became typical for many genre colleagues (such as Sentenced , the Swedish Cemetary or Darkseed ). The genre fathers Paradise Lost did not expand the male-female vocal interplay from the mid-1990s, but instead relied on memorable male vocal lines in the field of tension between melody and expressiveness. This development, away from the metal influence, culminated in the second half of the 1990s with the emergence of the genre Dark Rock, based on elements of alternative rock .

One of the bands, which the more moderate modification of the musical style, at that time still traded as Gothic Metal, led to greater popularity, were Type O Negative , who in 1993 (also due to the vocal volume of frontman Peter Steele ) the most famous title of the genre, Black No. 1 (Little Miss Scare-All) on the album Bloody Kisses . In addition, the scandalous and gigantic Steele quickly became a well-known person in the music business beyond the genre of Gothic Metal and thus ensured additional popularity of the entire style of music.

Secret Discovery , who already crossed gothic rock with punk and metal on their first work Way to Salvation from 1989 , released an album with Into the Void in 1993 that showed strong parallels to Paradise Lost's album Shades of God . The Dreadful Shadows debuted in 1994 with the metal-heavy album Estrangement . In the same year the previous NDT band Lacrimosa began to experiment with hard and fast guitars as well as orchestral arrangements on the EP Schakal and expanded this idea to the album Stille 1997. Lacrimosa were one of the bands that did not originally play Gothic Metal, but approached it successfully and across genres by touring with Sentenced and The Gathering on the On a Dark Winter's Night festival tour in 1996 . The former Death Doom band The Gathering mixed Doom Metal with progressive and alternative song structures and the powerful female vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen with the albums Mandylion and Nighttime Birds in the mid-1990s . The goth rock band Love Like Blood turned in 1995 with the album Exposure Metal elements to just one year later published Carl McCoy , singer and head of the Fields of the Nephilim , the Death and industrial-metal -lastige album Zoon under the one-time use of the name The Nefilim .

With the broad opening towards metal structures, the black scene experienced extensive upheavals, which also paved the way for other metal styles. After New German Hardness , Gothic Metal and parts of Alternative Metal had established themselves in the black scene, symphonic metal , dark rock as well as medieval rock and dark metal followed . The close connection with the cultural development often leads to a blanket title of various independent musical styles under the term Gothic Metal .

Development under the collective term

Due to the development of some protagonists of Gothic Metal towards Dark Rock and the music, the texts or the videos that are perceived as dark, bands that only have something to do with Gothic Metal in the sense of a general cultural and musical crossover and act completely independently of the concept of style , assigned to Gothic Metal. The frequent proximity to the black scene , which is itself often incorrectly called the Gothic scene , requires a categorization of many performers. In the black scene in particular, a broad spectrum of metal styles has developed, which are generally summarized under the name Gothic Metal, without showing any direct reference to the actual style.

In the second half of the 1990s, among others, Paradise Lost on Draconian Times and Type O Negative on October Rust temporarily removed the Doom elements from their sound and thus founded the hitherto unmarked Dark Rock . Through this development it happens that dark or sleaze rock bands like HIM , the late Lacrimas Profundere and The 69 Eyes are assigned to the collective term Gothic Metal. In addition, representatives of Dark Metal such as Cradle of Filth , Katatonia or Samsa's Dream were often discussed under the term Gothic Metal, especially because of their visual appearance and because of their recipients in the black scene. Further examples of artists who were occasionally assigned to Gothic Metal due to their appearance and the music that was perceived as dark are Oomph! or Rammstein , which are more likely to be assigned to the New German Hardship .

Sometimes labels, marketing agencies and commercially oriented media (e.g. Orkus , Sonic Seducer etc.) also attribute bands such as Nightwish , Epica , Within Temptation or Xandria to Gothic Metal for marketing strategy reasons, which is especially true in Gothic and is criticized in the Doom Metal scene. The music of performers who correspond to the style is sometimes referred to as "Gothic / Doom Metal" while the developments under the collective term are referred to as "softened by elf rock, kohl and plastic sound".

Such bands mostly dispense with Death Doom elements and the genre-typical Dark Wave elements, such as the use of male growls . These groups also lack the reduced tempo and the dense and introverted basic mood. Their style corresponds more and more to Power Metal with female vocals or classic Heavy Metal to Hard Rock . These groups are now mostly assigned to symphonic metal . Initiators of the genre, however, criticized this spread of the term.

“I am not interested in the majority of all the bands that come with front women in flowing robes. When all this stuff suddenly became Gothic Metal, this term became absolutely dispensable for us. "

- Greg Mackintosh

In many meetings, the term is still used as a collective term. Discussions of interpreters with different styles as Gothic Metal often refer to a corresponding aesthetic and socio-cultural aspect.

Popular works

Style-defining publications

Evolving publications

With cultural origins in the metal sector
With cultural origins in the Gothic area

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Vogel Interview with the former Gothic Metal band Paradise Lost Sonic Seducer, summer edition 1995 Page 30.
  2. ↑ a b c d Wolf Röben: History . In: Sonic Seducer (Ed.): Starfacts . 15 years of Gothic Metal. No. 6 . T.Vogel Musikzeitschriftenverlag, Oberhausen 2005, p. 4 .
  3. ↑ a b Wolf Röben: History . In: Sonic Seducer (Ed.): Starfacts . 15 years of Gothic Metal. No. 6 . T.Vogel Musikzeitschriftenverlag, Oberhausen 2005, p. 6 .
  4. ↑ Masi Kriegs: Tiamat . In: Sonic Seducer (Ed.): Starfacts . 15 years of Gothic Metal. No. 6 . T.Vogel Musikzeitschriftenverlag, Oberhausen 2005, p. 58 .
  5. ↑ Mirai Kawashima: SIGH's Mirai Kawashima on Celtic Frost's 'Into The Pandemonium'. Archived from the original on September 24, 2012 ; accessed on August 31, 2010 (English).
  6. ↑ The Thrash Metal Guide , accessed October 19, 2012.
  7. ↑ a b Micha Kite: Sumerland: Press: Pit Magazine: Carl McCoy interview. In: Pit Magazine # 55. 2006, accessed on August 31, 2010 (English): “For 10,000 moments the great beast writhed in the works of TYPE O NEGATIVE, MOONSPELL, TIAMAT, LACUNA COIL (as well as countless others) as all were heavily worshiping at the feet of FOTN (MOONSPELL even blatantly sampled the spoken work from Alister [sic!] Crowley). But even as these false idols cast their shadows across Nod there was no sign of Leviathan's return. "
  8. ↑ Jackie Smit: Under the Spell of the Antidote. Chronicles of Chaos, January 25, 2004, accessed August 31, 2010 : “We'd like to be remembered more along the lines of bands like Fields of the Nephilim; as a cult band. "
  9. ↑ Sin: Moonspell: Art is made to discover. Gothtronic, accessed on August 31, 2010 (English): “A band that really makes my kind of Gothic Metal is Fields of the Nephilim. They have a sound like Slayer but it's very dark. And they are a very big inspiration for what we do now. "
  10. ^ Nocturnal Euphony 2007. (No longer available online.) 2007, archived from the original on May 26, 2010 ; Retrieved on August 31, 2010 (English): “There was a moment when I realized the dark and gloomy atmosphere of bands such as The Cure and Fields of the Nephilim and this was something I thought I had found in metal music ... But pretty much at the same time I realized that Iron Maiden was a bit too candy colored for my taste and I got into Possessed , Bathory , Venom , Celtic Frost etc., I also got into the darker gothic / new wave scene of England in the late 80's. "
  11. ↑ Throat Dragons: TIAMAT: Call nuts again ... vampster , February 8, 2002, accessed on August 31, 2010 : “I think that the influence of bands like THE SISTERS OF MERCY, THE MISSION and FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM mainly found in Johan's voice. And I think he would sing the same way if he had never heard of Andrew Eldritch . "
  12. ^ Koerber, Scott: An Eternal Classic . In Mudrian, Albert: Precious Metal . Cambridge 2009 p. 121. ISBN 978-0-306-81806-6
  13. ↑ Thomas Vogel: Interview with the former gothic metal band Paradise Lost . In: Sonic Seducer. Summer edition 1995, p. 30.
  14. ↑ Interview with Nick Holmes, Zillo Musik-Magazin, No. 7/8, 1999, p. 27.
  15. ↑ Entry Music Magazine: Letters to the Editor - Letter from Thomas Thyssen . Issue 1/97, February / March 1997, p. 8.
  16. ↑ www.hell-is-open.de: Vanha: Within the Mist of Sorrow. Hell is Open, January 1, 2017, accessed July 29, 2019 .
  17. ^ Riley Rowe: Vanha: Within the Mist of Sorrow. Metal Injection, January 3, 2017, accessed July 29, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Metal styles: Gothic Metal at Disctopia Metal , accessed on January 11, 2014.
  19. ↑ Christoph Kurzer: Paradise Lost . In: Thomas Vogel Media eK (Ed.): Sonic Seducer . Icons. Oberhausen 2016, p. 80 .