The Steemit Hive Mind Starts Me On My Metal Opera Journey

Yesterday I asked Steemit readers to help me find some heavy metal music to my taste. In short, I was looking for something with more operatic power and overall musicality than most of the stuff I'd heard.

Boy, did they deliver! That posting has enough videos and links in the comments to keep me listening, exploring, and unpacking exquisite stuff for weeks. As a bonus, YouTube's algorithm seems to have gotten the gist of what I'm looking for, so the suggestions it throws at me are starting to sound more like what I'm looking for. Sometimes google-searching only goes so far, and you need the suggestions of smart listeners to kick your computer down the right path.

Thanks to a suggestion by @the-dagda, I've spent much of today listening to French "Baroque-Metal" band Igorrr. It was lawn-mowing day, which here at Toad Hall involves several hours of riding around on a lawn tractor with ear-buds crammed in place to protect my hearing from the roaring drone of an inefficient two cylinder engine. It might be a little ironic to pipe heavy metal music at high volume through those ear-buds, but then again no one's ever accused me of being a sensible man.
In any case, heavy metal music is a pretty satisfying accompaniment to an aggravating chore.

And boy does Igorrr deliver. They've got enough drum and guitar to stand up to the loudest lawn mower engine, but they also pack in musical influences from across the past 500 years. They even name-drop Scarlatti as the title of one of their tracks! There's opera, harpsichord, dubstep, electronica, romantic piano (Chopin), and yes, some of that heavy-metal throat singing that was driving me crazy before. But here it's an ingredient, not the whole meal.

Because I knew I was losing a lot of the subtlety beneath the mower blades, I came back inside and listened to much of the music again. It's all the richer with a proper set of headphones, and some of their videos are works of art in themselves.

Here's "Opus Brain," a seven minute horror movie with steampunk elements, as well as some great contemporary dance. There's so much going on in this video that it seems to pass in a flash.

As I said, YouTube's been providing some great suggestions now that I've started down this rabbit hole. Here's Igorrr at a recent Metal Oper'Art festival. (If that's not the scene I wanted to find, I don't know what is.) One thing I find interesting about these links - very few are in English. That's all right with me. You don't really need to know what these songs are saying to enjoy their emotional impact. After all, how much traditional opera does the audience get to understand? But I wonder if this sort of music will ever find a home in America. I have my doubts, since it draws from too many sources to get slotted into an easily marketable category. (Except, perhaps, for awesome.) Generally, unless an American band can be categorized into a simple to understand slot, no one's going to produce it. That's the reason so much of our stuff sounds the same.

That's ok, though. The important thing is that there's other stuff out there.

Just one more video today. Here's Igorrr's "ieuD", which is striking for it's harpsichord introduction and another well-shot video.

There are some pretty funny reaction videos of critics and fans listening to this stuff for the first time. The expressions on their faces are almost as entertaining as the music. And here's the first part of a Making-Of video from Igorr's latest album, which demonstrates just what a tremendous amount of work, talent, and creativity goes into the production of this unique and varied music.