Epic heavy metal is not a tempo, a tuning or a costume. It is a way of keeping time by the story instead of the chorus, and the records that deserve the name all strike the same bargain with a listener: a tale longer than any single, a clean voice out in front to tell it, riffs that march rather than run, and no way out until the last king is in the ground. Everything else is decoration.
In the autumn of 218 BC, by Livy's account, Hannibal's army coming down off the Alps found a landslide across the only track, and his men felled trees, heaped them against the rock face, set them alight, poured sour wine over the glowing stone until it split and smashed a road through the rubble with iron picks, so the elephants could be led down one at a time. The best of this music moves the same way. It does not leap the obstacle. It breaks it apart in full view and walks the whole weight of the song straight through.
The Kansas trio that let its fourth album run to almost fifty three minutes was Manilla Road, and on Open the Gates, released by the French label Black Dragon in 1985, two of the songs, "The Ninth Wave" and "Witches Brew", would not fit on the two sides at all and had to be pressed onto a separate twelve inch disc tucked into the same sleeve. The rest is the plainest statement of the whole method: Arthurian kings, dragons and witchcraft, riffs laid down at a walking pace, and a singer who tells the story rather than shouting it. Nobody asked for a shorter record. Nobody in the band would have supplied one.
Every branch of the family came away from the parent along some line or other, and the full map of those fractures is drawn in the longer account. This one split on subject and on length at the same time, which is why a speed metal fan and an epic fan can share every Judas Priest record up to 1982 and then agree on almost nothing afterwards.
What epic heavy metal is made of
The label gets pinned on anything with a sword on the sleeve, which is too generous by half. Four pieces of evidence decide the case, and a record needs most of them:
- Length the story earns: songs of six to ten minutes in which the verses work as chapters and the instrumental middle stands in for the battle.
- A marching pace: slower than speed metal, faster than doom, the tempo of men walking a long way under a heavy load.
- A narrator's voice: clean, usually high, telling the tale in the third person or through a named hero, never snarling it.
- A book on the shelf behind the band: Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Homer, the Norse sagas, the Arthurian cycle.
The door into all of it opened in 1976, when Rainbow gave "Stargazer" more than eight minutes, a wizard and an orchestra, and the lineage runs from there through the American underground of the early eighties, Manowar in New York, Cirith Ungol in California and the Kansas trio already named, a handful of bands who sold almost nothing and wrote the rules anyway. What they handed down is one principle. The story decides when the song ends, and the chorus waits its turn.
The story decides when the song ends, and the chorus waits its turn.
Epic heavy metal on the border with doom and power metal
In the English parishes that still keep the custom of beating the bounds, a procession walks the whole boundary every spring with willow wands and thrashes each marker stone as it passes, and in the older form of the rite the choirboys were turned upside down and bumped head first against the stones, so that a border nobody had ever written down would stay fixed in living skulls. Epic heavy metal holds its borders the same way. It walks them often and it walks them hard.
On one side lies doom. The Stockholm band that took the word into its own debut title in 1986, Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, was Candlemass, and what came after it, slower, heavier and sung like a funeral mass, has a history of its own under the name epic doom. The line between the two is tempo. When the march slows until each chord takes a full bar to land, the song has crossed the stones.
On the other side lies power metal, faster and higher, from the American variant of Riot and Jag Panzer to the European one that descends from Helloween. The line there is also tempo, run the other way, and the voice with it: once the singer is pushed to the top of his range over double kick drums at a gallop, the story has been handed to the chorus. The border moved several times over the eighties. The two neighbours never merged.
The keepers after the collapse
By the end of the eighties the American founders had lost their audience at home, and the campaign passed to smaller hands in stranger places. The Yorkshire band that carried the flag through the leanest decade, formed in Dewsbury by Rich Walker on guitar, was Solstice, and New Dark Age, released by Misanthropy Records in 1998, set the Manowar march of 1983 beside melodies that seem to come out of English folk song, sung by Morris Ingram, whose acoustic interludes carry as much of the record as the doom riffs around them. Walker also ran a small label devoted to doom and traditional metal, the Miskatonic Foundation. It kept the lights on.
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Alfred Tennyson, Morte d'Arthur
The next keepers went to the library. The German band whose first two albums took their titles straight off the anthropology shelf is Atlantean Kodex, founded in Bavaria in 2005 by Manuel Trummer on guitar, and The Golden Bough, released by the Italian label Cruz del Sur in 2010, borrowed its name and its subject from James George Frazer's study of magic and religion, first published in 1890. Its successor went to Robert Graves.
On any honest reading those two records moved the style further than anything since the mid eighties, because they proved the source text could be a work of scholarship rather than a paperback with a barbarian on the cover. The pulps did not go away. They simply got company.
The young bands and the old shelf
The debut that paid its debt in the plainest currency available, a full cover of Manilla Road's "Necropolis" set among its own songs, belonged to Visigoth, five players from Salt Lake City, and The Revenant King, released by Metal Blade in January 2015, put the old tempo and the old subject back on the label that had pressed so much of the American underground thirty years earlier. The title track takes its time. It is supposed to.
The Vancouver guitarist who began a band as a one man project in 2009 and built it over nine years into a full line up is Geoff Blackwell, and Gatekeeper released East of Sun on Cruz del Sur on 27 April 2018, with a sleeve painted by Duncan Storr and "Blade of Cimmeria" chosen for the video. Cimmeria is the homeland Howard gave to Conan. The riff goes through the opening bars like a scythe through a bank of standing bracken, and the voice arrives only once the ground lies flat.
The chronicler who finally gave the warrior women of the pulp shelf a place at the front of the band is Sarah Ann of Smoulder, out of Toronto, whose Times of Obscene Evil and Wild Daring, released by Cruz del Sur in April 2019, lifted its title from a Moorcock story and named its songs after Howard's "Sword Woman", the tale of Dark Agnes de Chastillon, Howard's swordswoman, and C. L. Moore's "Black God's Kiss", the 1934 story that introduced Jirel of Joiry. The shelf got wider. The rules stayed exactly where the vanguard of 1983 had left them.
Those rules were written along the subject line. The stage was a second line out of the same parent, older and louder, and the road that runs from shock rock to heavy metal started with coffins and burning crowns long before anyone had heard of a sword and sorcery album. The two lines rarely cross. When they do, the story still sets the clock.
