New Canadian Metal: The Quest Progresses!

So, in less than a week i have completely overwhelmed myself with Canadian metal bands to check out, and my spending on CD orders is at the point where I need to keep written record and calculate what I’ll need to be paying off on credit card bills over the next month or two.

But it’s been oh so much fun listening to so many bands and finding a lot that I either had to have soon or that I will certainly be calling home when it’s financially safe for me to do so. There have also been many bands who were very good, but as I’m going for diversity in style and region of origin, I couldn’t just go and get every cool power metal act from Alberta or killer death metal act from Quebec.

Two sites that were very helpful in pushing my expenditure limits were Hellbound’s lists of ten best Canadian metal album picks for each year from 2009 to 2018. Just click on the link and look at the best album for each year and find the link for the top ten of each year.

The other site nearly knocked me off my chair. By this point I had consulted several “professional” lists, meaning those on pro-like or pro sites like Hellbound, Loudwire, Kerrang, and so on. A lot of bands were turning up again and again. I had written down about 100 bands or so and listened to music samples of about 50 bands on YouTube or BandCamp. Then I found this list on Rate Your Music. Out of 67 bands, I had only heard of 16. But what caught my attention more was that most of them were labeled with any combination of symphonic metal, power metal, progressive metal, and melodeath. I realized that I had been busy gathering death metal, thrash metal, black metal, classic and trad metal, tech death, doom, stoner, hard rock. Power metal is not an area I have much listening experience in so I decided to hear what our Canuck bands were capable of. Wow! Lots of great music. Unfortunately, not all of it readily available for purchase on CD. Nevertheless, with so many bands to choose from, it was easy to find a handful of solid representatives for my project.

New comers that have been ordered or set on standby are:

Cauldron

Riot City

Lutharo

Viathyn

Borealis

Chthe’ilist

Begrime Exemious

Forteresse

Karkaos

Ravenous

The Agonist

Longhouse (download only but sound good)

Electric Magma

Phobocosm

Tenet

and just because they’re from Kamloops,

Benthic

and just because they are from Nanaimo,

The Body Politic

Othyrworld (a.k.a. Sacred Blade – an older Vancouver band from the eighties but good stuff)

Not saying that I will buy albums by all of these bands but they have stood out for one reason or another. And there are plenty more. Just look at those lists! Canada really rocks!

 

New Canadian Metal: A Quest!

A few weeks back, I caught an episode of Banger TV where Spell‘s latest album, Opulent Decay, was reviewed. Two things caught my attention: the band is from Vancouver, and I had never heard a band quite like that, especially one appearing on a heavy metal video channel. It excited me that there was a Vancouver band playing that kind of music and I quickly ordered the album. I’ve been enjoying it more with each listen.

However, it got me thinking about other bands like Anciients, Blood Ceremony, and Unleash the Archers. My 21st Century Canadian metal releases are mostly tech death bands from Quebec or Devin Townsend projects. It occurred to me that Canadian heavy metal and heavy metal in general has a lot more to offer even in the recent years than the brutal styles like metalcore, deathcore, slam, and tech death. I had also been hearing a lot about how rock is dying and metal is dying, and I don’t believe a word of it. It actually had me thinking to do a video featuring new, young rock bands, and a recent encounter with videos by Starcrawler had me thinking to begin my search in that territory. But I recognized that even though I thought Starcrawler were pretty cool, there wasn’t enough outside of the videos to hold my interest to the point of a passion. But if the genre of music is metal (or prog) and the region is Canada, well then it would be very easy for me to become passionate about finding out where the goods are.

The first thing I did was to do a Google search for best Canadian bands of the 2010s. I found some pretty good reference lists: Kerrang’s list of twenty heavy Canadian bands you need to know, Kerrang’s list of 13 Canadian metal albums everyone should own,  a list of ten Canadian albums of the decade (2010s), Hellbound’s list of top Canadian metal albums of 2017 (more years!), and web site lists like BestBlackMetal’s Canadian list, and Angry Metal Guy’s Canadian albums list.

With so many bands and albums, I decided that I would not simply compile a list of new bands. If I was going to make a video for my channel, I needed more focus. Perhaps the best five albums (in my opinion) by bands who had formed in the last ten to twelve years with attention to regional and stylistic diversity. It was easy to find bands from Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal but I wanted more regional diversity. Calgary and Saskatoon were also hot, as was Winnipeg (no surprise). But how about other places? I began searching for metals bands, province by province, territory by territory. This lead me to bands like Bushwhacker of Whitehorse who now reside in Vancouver, Death Valley Driver of Prince Edward Island, Hellacaust of Nova Scotia, and Category VI of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

I also found regional stylistic hotbeds like trad metal and stoner metal in Alberta, doom and stoner metal in B.C., tech death in Saskatoon, noise in Manitoba, metalcore in Ontario, and black metal in Quebec and Nova Scotia, not to forget the tech death scene in Quebec. This meant that my quest to pick out five new bands was actually going to mean not searching hard to find them but rather digging through dozens and dozens of bands to find which ones impressed me the most. And though I planned to take my time and slowly and carefully make my selections, I have already enjoyed so much of what I have heard on BandCamp and YouTube that the purchasing of albums has already begun.

So, it seems that the final video video will have a broader theme. There will be a top five albums/bands, but also a list to a top twelve from which the top five will come and a longer list of bands that I enjoyed enough to want to own a copy of an album. The video is a work in progress, but below I give you the bands I have either ordered or have on the list to order. Not all are actually young enough bands to make my list, but their music is new to me and so I decided to pick up a few older artists along the way.

Black Wizard

Dead Quiet

Wormwitch

Bushwhacker

Skull Fist

Woodhawk

Striker

Kobra and the Lotus

Black Thunder

Gomorrah

Hellacaust

Death Valley Driver

Sorciers des glaces (older band)

Endless Chaos

Oni

Hazzerd

Tomb Mold

Bison BC (Bison)

Big / Brave

Chron Goblin

Wasted Heretics

Maelstrom Vale

Despised Icon

KEN mode

Traveler

…so far, that’s where I am at in my quest. But it’s proving one thing: that the Canadian metal scene appears quite robust in spite of fears that heavy metal will die because there are no more younger bands to carry the torch. I would disagree.