AOR: Not metal just looks like it sometimes. Radio friendly songs about love, love waiting to happen and love gone tragically wrong. Rock music your mum likes. Lyrics about cars and girls compulsory and at some point they will use the word ‘boulevard’
Hardcore. Not metal but punk with metal influences. Very angry about most things but especially politicians. Bands attempting to sing about cars and girls are ripped apart by a crazed mob.
Hard Rock All metal bands are Hard Rock not all Hard Rock bands are metal. Bon Jovi, Aerosmith for example. To make matters awkward, bands can skip back and forth between Metal and HR over the course of a career or even a single album. Lyrics about cars and girls very common.
Nu-Metal: Metal that loudly proclaims it isn’t actually metal. Most traditional metal fans would agree with this. Lyrics about anger and alienation over downtuned, chuggy guitars. Beards and piercings a must.
Power Metal: Very popular on the continent, especially Germany. Overblown and frequently slips into the Zone Of Cheese but who cares when you’re having so much fun thrashing that air guitar. Lyrics often fantasy orientated so if they sing about girls they will be riding dragons. One of the few musical genres that sings in praise of itself.
True Metal: A variant of Power Metal with extra studs and leather.
Epic Metal: Another variant of Power Metal with a dog-eared copy of Lord of the Rings in it’s back pocket. Big, big singalong choruses and frenzied keyboards. Invented by the Italians.
Eurometal. Metal from Europe (duh) An old term to describe bands that would nowadays be described as Power metal. Tended towards leather trousers and high-pitched vocals.
Neo-classical :Metal with delusions of grandeur. Blame Ritchie Blackmore who used to jam bits of classical music into all his solos. Then blame Malmsteen, who wanted to be Bach with a guitar.
Prog-Metal: Exactly what you’d expect. Think Metallica jamming with ELP. Long instrumental bits a must. Presumably the singer wanders off to lean on the speakers and wave a tambourine.
Thrash Metal: Metal with the accelerator to the floor. Also known as Speed Metal, Frash and (in the early days) ‘Bands that can’t play their bloody instruments’
Lyrics about Death, War and politicians being twats, although one German band devoted their entire career to singing about beer.
Death Metal. Thrash is Metal taken to the next level. Death is the level above that. DM bands have a lead singer that is trying to hack his lungs up while the rest of the band beat each other to death with their instruments.
Melodic Death Metal: Sounds like an oxymoron but a variant popular in Sweden. Has actual melody, fluid guitar solos and definite touches of Iron Maiden.
Gore Metal: Death Metal that’s seen too many slasher flicks. Trust me, you don’t want to read the lyric sheet.
Black Metal. Several different variations. Some bands are Pagans, others Satanic and a few are Vikings. All of them agree that the Catholic Church is the source of all that is wrong with the world. Except the few Christian BM bands. Somebody really got confused there, didn’t they?
National Socialist Black Metal: Music by Nazi twats for Nazi twats.
Necro :A sub-sub genre of BM. Not entirely sure what this is but I think the whole point is to sound like you recorded the whole thing on an answering machine in someone’s basement.
Hair Metal: So called because the bands involved worked out their stage outfits and their hairstyle before they wrote the songs. Rarely sang about anything else but cars and girls. Tended to have a lot of female fans because the band members were chosen for their cheekbones.
Funk Metal: The more inventive bands blended Funk, Punk, Rap and Metal into something wild. Others were Hard Rock bands that told their bassist to go away and come back when he could play slap-bass.
Industrial Metal. Imagine someone miked up the worlds biggest sewing machine. Then played the same two chords repeatedly over it while a madman barked random strangeness into a megaphone. Then imagine the headache you will get after an album of this.
Glam Rock: Akin to Hair Metal but the bands wore more makeup and their hair was much, much bigger. Sang about girls . While looking like them. Glamsters and Thrashers hated each other with a passion and fought a bitter war across the pages of Kerrang for many years.
NWOBHM: The New Wave of British Heavy Metal (1979-1982) Metal’s reaction to Punk. Def Leppard and Iron Maiden became massive. Ethel the Frog didn’t.
Gothic Metal: Metal guitars, Depeche Mode synths. Female vocalists like to wear long flowing dresses. Sometimes sing about girls but only if they are vampires.
Atmospheric Metal A term that crops up sometimes , applied to bands that started off as Black or Gothic Metal but let their Pink Floyd influences out of the bag. Usually considered part of the Metal scene, their fans are frequently Metal fans but not really metal anymore.
Techno Metal: Not metal you can dance to but a variant that places great influence on technical proficiency. Lots of widdly guitars.
Rap-Metal :Got boring very quickly
Stoner Rock: Not actually metal but anything that worships Black Sabbath that much is surely in the right area.
Folk-Metal: Again, exactly what it sounds like. Metal with tin whistles and bagpipes. More recently some maniac introduced accordions into the sound.
White Metal: Christian Rock. Dearie Me.
Widdly-Widdly There was a lot of this around in the late 80s, mostly on the Shrapnel label. Take one guitar hotshot, lend him a drummer and a bassist and put him in the studio to lay down an entire album of solos. Bought by other guitar hotshots and people who wanted to be guitar hotshots.
Biker Metal. Neo-Classical music with multiple interlocking themes and aspirational lyrics rich with subtext. Yeah right. Greasy, no-frills rock about beer and wild times performed by greasy rockers who drink beer and have wild times.
Pop Metal Not usually a compliment. Metal polished up for the mass audience. (Hello Def Leppard)
Heavy Rock: Ancestor of Metal and the term most commonly used until the late 70s. Blues with the guitars cranked up.
Rock and Roll: A lot of Metal/Hard Rock bands describe themselves as this. They fool no-one.
Pirate Metal Or rather Pirate-themed-sea-shanty metal. Conclusive proof that you can do metal songs about anything
Metalcore Shouty hardcore-style vocals matched to Thrash Metal guitars with the odd chuggy bit for the pit ninjas to go wild to. There seems to be a lot of this stuff about at the moment.
Djent. I have no idea what this is, nobody will tell me and I am convinced that the whole thing is a joke that everybody else is in on. Bastards.
Visual Kei. A slightly unhinged Japanese combination of metal, punk, gothic, industrial, pop and sheer bloody oddness. Not really metal but can sound like it. Some bands tend towards costume choices that make Glam rockers look like brickies.
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