Why heavy metal is good for you - 5 - It's more complex than other genres

I'm not saying complex makes good. In fact, some of my favorite music both classical and metal is fairly simple. But after hearing for many years that heavy metal is the musically illiterate ramblings of idiots, I feel inclined to defend this music on the basis that it is indeed quite complex.

Exhibit A: "Recasting Metal Rhythm and Meter in the Music of Meshuggah"

This thesis focuses on the rhythm of Meshuggah, which to me sounds like a Prong/Exhorder combination with Suffocation in the wings -- in short, a continuation of a metal tradition and not something new per se. But beyond rhythm is metal also complex?

Outside of rhythm, heavy metal has complexity in other forms. For starters, it uses what classical music fans call the ostinato, or riff. Actually, it uses lots of them and strings them together. Where your average rock song has two riffs, a bridge and a solo, your average metal song may have a dozen riffs, several bridge-like transitions and a solo (or two).

I guess it's possible to write a ton of related patterns in the same key, throw them together, and make random garbage -- that's not complex, but more importantly, it's also not good. Surely some metal bands do this, but none I listen to. The good ones make the riffs work together and as a result create some of the most complex music known to popular culture.

One authority identifies this tendency as:

Songs written from short cyclic phrases called riffs, which unlike rock riffs used moveable chords of inspecific harmonic bonding, making the melody and rhythm of the phrase more important than key or voicing. Metal bands tend to use more riffs per song, and not in the traditional cycle of verse-chorus, in a way quite similar to progressive bands like King Crimson and Yes, both of whom used aggressive distortion.

...

The future members of Black Sabbath, upon seeing a horror movie and wondering if people would ever pay to have that experience in rock music, created the antithesis to distracting escapism: a descent into the complex and violent world of reality.

Its heaviness migrated into a different style of composition: other bands wrote songs around open chords which were strummed in a repeated pattern, and then modulated, while Black Sabbath used moveable power chords to make phrases into riffs and it was the change in those phrases that communicated a difference in outlook. It was more like classical music, where harmony is so well-studied that it is used as a device toward "narrative," through-composed pieces where the change in motifs and their accompaniment conveys a string of moods that like a mythology or a fable convey the idea of a journey from one point to another.

With this development, they gave meaning to the sound. Its context of topics gave its heaviness form, but musically it was heavy as well, using thundering chords that stripped out traditional harmony and made the riff instead, like the nihilistic voice of an angry god, speak the truth that completed the poetry of contrast in each song. By throwing away form, and the form of socialization which "peace" and "love" implied, Black Sabbath brought danger back into a stagnant modern life -- specifically, the danger that in all the attempts to stay away from the darkness, we as a civilization had missed an essential truth.

Assimilation of Heavy Metal

Don't believe me yet? Check out these micro-symphonies of complex metal:

Rigor Mortis - Six Feet Under

Atheist - An Incarnation's Dream

Metallica - Orion

Burzum - My Journey to the Stars

Asphyx - Depths of Eternity

Therion - The Way

Hellhammer - Triumph of Death

Enslaved - Norvegr