Thrash metal

 

I would dispute Venom as being the prototype for thrash - they basically introduced the concept of Black Metal, which was essentially the darker side of Sabbath, Priest and so on, but did not actually play thrash - at least, not on their first 3 albums.  

 

The "punk" clue that Venom drew most heavily on was a stunning inability to play. They really were shockingly bad.

 

BUT they still created music of worth from sheer bloody-minded attitude - another punk basic that even the Sex Pistols didn't manage despite it being core to their values.

 

The energy of punk is what differentiates NWoBHM generally from "old school heavy metal" (AKA Hard Rock) - but a significant proportion of NWoBHM bands also caught onto the showmanship of Glam Rock (Sweet, Queen, etc), the adventurousness of Priest and the technical skills of not only the old school guitarists like Hendrix, Clapton, Blackmore, etc., but also of technique-maestros Schenker and Roth of the Scorpions. There are certain chops that crop up again and again in NWoBHM solos that can be traced back to those gentlemen. Likewise, a significant chunk of riffererama can be traced back to Priest (obviously you could track it back further, but you'd be moving away from the core style of metal). 

 

Toaster Mantis wrote: There are a lot of bands/albums between circa 1981 and 1985 which I would simply call "Modern Metal" ... not strictly NWOBHM anymore, but also not part of the styles which were established later (Thrash, Death, Black etc.). That's weird... doesn't "modern metal" usually describe 1990s stuff that's very distinctly 1990s? But, yeah, the lines between thrash and death and black metal were much blurrier back then. It helps a lot if you think of genres as vague descriptive terms rather than narrow boxes.

 

Couldn't agree more - but Heavy Metal as a style, rather than a genre is much less vague - and a very useful handle. To me, Thrash is also a style, the first example of which is "Exciter" by Judas Priest, in which the guitar rhythms are constantly picked alternately. One can hear this in tracks like "Highway Star" - but somehow it's not the same. The consolidation of thrash can first be heard on Metal Church and Metallica's debuts  in which the correct drum backbeat is used.

 

Death Metal of course, originates in the title of the Possessed song, but the sound and style was only fully realised by Mr Schuldiner (who initially, unfortunately, failed to notice the free-form time signatures of the riffs that Possessed used in that song).

 

"Modern Metal" seems to be more a sound than a style, and I would argue that the sound started with Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell", but that this sound evolved through the 1980s - Metallica's "Ride The Lightning" is another good example, but in the 4 years between those two releases, this was not the common sound of metal, due mainly to budget production. Metallica's self-titled album in 1991 would seem to be the ultimate consolidation of the modern metal sound thanks to Bob Rock - who also produced Survivor's 1979 album, which also sports quite a modern production.

 

To go back even earlier, Rodger Bain's production of "Rocka Rolla" is much closer to modern metal than 1970s hard rock, and puts the committee production of "Sad Wings..." well into the shade - as the Bain mixes of the "Sad Wings..." songs on "Hero Hero" (early releases only!) clearly show.

 

 

Toaster Mantis wrote: I still wouldn't call Accept thrash... far from all of their songs were all-out speedfests like Fast as a Shark, Flash Rocking Man or Breaker. Not all fast Accept songs were thrashy either - Burning, for example, sounds more like like Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven or Blue Öyster Cult's Me262 than anything else.

 

I would agree with this asssessment - to my ears at least, Accept did not cross over into thrash from speed metal - on the whole, when they played fast, it was almost entirely downstroke style, and the drumming style was the typical "four to the floor" rather than the "twostroke" backbeat.