Metal music came to existence probably in the 70's. Based on the rock music and then hardened with tougher guitars, vocals, the drummers also started to hit their instruments with much more power. The early metal music was based on a more agressive way of playing and was produced only with el. guitars and drums. The harder it sounded, the better it was. But it's different these days, but I'll get to that later.

     Metal symbolized power and hardness. And people started to listen to it and their number starte

     In the 80's also many sub-styles (or categories) of metal came into existence. You can read about them lower in the characteristics of the particular styles. But still I have to mention speed metal, that started to break through in Germany. Remember the album "Walls of Jericho" by Helloween? That's probably one of the best speed metal albums ever. Rough and fast music that moved the evolucion of metal another step further. For me personally this album means a lot, because it was actually my very first metal cassete. When I heared it for the first time I was shocked. I said to myself, wow, this stuff is really hard, and so I started to listen to metal. These days different bands are my favourite, but I still like Helloween pretty much.

_ atmospheric metal - this style is something like gothic metal but much softer. An example might be Tiamat of the last 4 years. In the music you can hear many additions like the whispering sound of the see, sounds of the forest etc. Into this category you can add also The Gathering with the album "How To Measure A Planet", where you can hear a a radio transmission from a space station. So it's more like something lighter. No mayhem this time. Clear atmospheric metal si mostly a pretty boring style.

     Another band that playes power metal are Runnig Wild. They for instance aimed mostly on the times of the pirates and bucaneers (Under Jolly Roger, Pile Of Skulls, Port Royal, Black Hand Inn) and lately they started to preffer the times of the famous French general Napoleona Bonaparte (Victory)

_ doom metal - slow death metal. A short and perfect characteristic. That would do if you'd write about it in the year 1993. But today doom metal is somewhere else. The basics are still the same but the sound alltogether is different. This was the first style where nonmetal instruments appear, like violins with My Dying Bride, harphs with Elbereth, a female angelic voice and cello with Theatre Of Tragedy etc. Doom metal just set a new direction where metal should be heading. The most typical doom metal of today is: hard music, two vocalists (a female voice and a male murmur) and various flutes, violins, samples, keyboards etc.

     So, that was a short characteristic of the particular styles, the way I understand them. Of course, I might not match your opinion in some of the characteristics but there's nothing I can do about that. Everybody has his own opinion to each style and sees the borders between the particular styles somewhere else. We can talk about that in the Pub. All your comments about this article are welcome.

     The gratest and most popular metal bands were being founded on the break of the 70's and 80's. That time was being flooded by the "new wawe of brithish heavy metal", NWOBHM in short. The era of harder metal began. Everybody will probably recall the band Iron Maiden, the probably most well known metal band from the British Isles. Yes, they belonged and with some fall-outs still belong among the best on the metal scene. I'm not going to write too much about them right now, becuase there's plenty of articles and biographies on the Internet anyway. Heavy metal slowly began to crawl into the awareness of the fans of hard music.

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