The Corroseum forum (new design under construction)

ION BRITTON wrote:There were surely hints of blackness in the pre-1984 material, but the '84 materal is exactly what this thread is about, sound-, lyric- and imagewise

I don't remember what the early demo's sound like.
So Running Wild should go to 1984.
Mercyful Fate to 1983.
And what about Death SS? They were pretty evil early on.

I can see your point daniel and I agree to a certain degree. VENOM for example never were black metal musically for me although their lyrics were important to the bands of the 2nd wave of BM. We all know now that they didn't really believe in what they were writing, but there dozens of bands that took them seriously and their attitude was shaped by those lyrics.
RUNNING WILD were not black metal in the sense of the 2nd wave BM bands, but their music on the first albums was so dark and evil that I personally can't find a better term to describe it.

ION BRITTON wrote:I can see your point daniel and I agree to a certain degree. VENOM for example never were black metal musically for me although their lyrics were important to the bands of the 2nd wave of BM. We all know now that they didn't really believe in what they were writing, but there dozens of bands that took them seriously and their attitude was shaped by those lyrics.
RUNNING WILD were not black metal in the sense of the 2nd wave BM bands, but their music on the first albums was so dark and evil that I personally can't find a better term to describe it.

And like Rick says in the opening post:

I'd like to ask you guys' opinions on what bands up until, say, 1986, might be called Black Metal without stretching the designation too much, and also taking into consideration that by then these labels were far less defined and rigid than they are now.

Question is are we or aren't we stretching it a bit by labeling for example VENOM as black metal?

I like to just think of it as all those bands influenced certain people to create something new: black metal. Sometimes when these discussions come up it feels a bit like 80's enthusiasts are trying to put the '2nd wave' down by sort of saying haha you just ripped off these older bands. But they didn't, they took certain aspects and created something new. I can't see many being a bigger DIRECT musical influence than Sarcofago.

ION BRITTON wrote:Question is are we or aren't we stretching it a bit by labeling for example VENOM as black metal?

At War With Satan can't be anything else than black metal.

Since there is no strict musical path most of these bands on the list follow it agains falls upon the lyrical content to create cohesion, and if the music is largely inconsequential then does that mean we can take ANY metal style and write satanic lyrics and end up with BM? I'll start playing covers of Stryper, but re-write the lyrics, now motherfuckin black.

'At War With Satan', I know I'm not the only person who upon first hearing it thought Venow were warring AGAINST Satan, no matter how strange it seemed haha. But the grammatical structure is very ambiguous

I remember some people claiming the 2nd wave of BM isn't even BM, which always left me wondering whether 'True BM' was the smallest goddamn genre on Earth.

You forgot the band Mortem (Per) from 1986... now only know as a Death Metal band, and the really unknown band Hastur (Per) from 1984.

pd.- Put Running Wild in that list !

Black Shepherd (Bel) from 1983, Sargatanas (Mex) from 1986, Blasphemy (Can) from 1984, Acid (Bel) from 1980... to name a few.

Why Acid???

The Knell wrote:Why Acid???

and why not?

Acid? okay! I'll add Demon

The 'Black Metal' in the 80s only was a label created for the Metal Media for bands with satanic lyrics, Acid was on it.