Day 6: Arch Enemy – Anthems of Rebellion If there’s one thing you can say about metal, it’s that it’s had a long term hormonal imbalance when it comes to major acts. With only a few exceptions in 40 years, it’s been a male dominated genre from the stage. By the mid-1990s, the technical excellence was over the top, but the genre as a whole was suffering from a lack of conviction and drowning in middle-class suburban testosterone. So, it’s 1995 and you put together an extreme metal supergroup, you know, like you do. All the pieces are there, but somehow, it just doesn’t work right. Your album is insanely aggressive, intensely musical, and everything your fan base expected. It’s a solid album but something’s off. It’s all weirdly middle of the road. You push two more albums out, and they do well, but they just aren’t killing it. So, 4 years in, your bass becomes a revolving door, and then your vocalist bails. You look for a professional who can get up to speed, do the job, and hopefully gets what you’ve been trying to do. And that’s when you accidentally redefine your sandbox. Because the person who you’ve been looking for turns out to be a German woman with a massive voice and huge charisma. There’s a lot of media noise and it’s all treating your band like a like it’s become a novelty act. So, you head into the studio, make a record, and put that novelty treatment in the grave. Then you follow it up with new recordings of tracks from the first three albums, and that wraps that novelty coffin up in battleship chains. Because 5 years of well-written metal is suddenly being delivered with real conviction by someone who means it. Gossow completely transforms these songs from an exercise in middle-class suburban escapism to something convincing and real. This is where Arch Enemy started a renaissance in the genre. Because Angela brought back conviction to the music. This is where Angela Gossow changed the game in extreme metal. This is why, in 2018, Arch Enemy is still female-fronted, and women are increasingly significant to the survival of the art form. And if you want your metal to be something more than a pose, you need to listen to the women. Because that’s where you find real frustration, rage and injustice.

via Facebook https://ift.tt/2w3JUhZ