When people say that the 90s was a terrible time for metal, I feel the need to ask them what the hell they're smoking. It was a decade for extreme metal. The kind of music that wouldn't have reached the charts regardless of whether metal was in or not.
Okay, sure Maiden, Priest and the likes dropped in popularity but they still wrote great material. I actually like the fact the Grunge eliminated Metal from the mainstream. There were too many posers and poser bands at the time. Let's face it, the glam metal trend was milking metal music for all that it was worth and giving it a bad reputation. Most people who say that metal was at its peak in the 80s are just nostalgic elitists who claim that (insert popular thrash metal band name here) reached the peak of musical prowess. The Florida death metal scene gave birth to Obituary, Deicide, Morbid Angel and Death who all made ground-breaking albums. The infamous Norwegian black metal scene produced fantastic albums such as Empeor's
In The Nightside Eclipse, Immortal's
Pure Holocaust and of course,
Transilvanian Hunger, Darkthrone's minimalistic masterpiece of raw black metal (which also spawned numerous clone bands, but that's another story). Athiest, Cynic and Pestilence combined jazz fusion with death metal making for some very interesting twists to the genre (although many death metal fans didn't react too well to these works).
Yes, there's lots more where that came from but it's great when a genre is rendered unfashionable because it weeds out the bandwagon hoppers from the serious artists. So, yes Shadow, I agree that the 90s were great for metal! [!--emo&
--][img src=\'style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/biggrin.gif\' border=\'0\' style=\'vertical-align:middle\' alt=\'biggrin.gif\' /][!--endemo--] Even amongst Maiden fans, I think Bruce's solo works are fairly underrated. When everybody was screaming "Bring Bruce back", hardly anyone bought
The Chemical Wedding. [!--emo&
--][img src=\'style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/dry.gif\' border=\'0\' style=\'vertical-align:middle\' alt=\'dry.gif\' /][!--endemo--]