VEGANGELICA

What are some of your favorite symphonic metal pieces? Do you feel they count as metal music?

I heard a symphonic metal piece, the Overture to "Black Symphony," for the first time yesterday and loved it.

The reason I loved it is probably that the music just sounded like classical music with a pleasing, ominous brooding feeling to it, which is typical of plain 'ol classical music.

I wouldn't have realized the song was part of the "symphonic metal" genre if I hadn't read that this is the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Symphony
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Within_Temptation

Within Temptation with Metropole Orchestra: "Black Symphony - Overture"
"Within Temptation" is a Dutch symphonic metal band that paired up with a symphony orchestra to create a whole album for their "Black Symphony," with this being the first movement. After listening to this, I listened to a short piece by the band Within Temptation all by themselves and was "meh" about it, but the full orchestration for "Black Symphony" is great:

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The Batlord

I can never get into this genre cause it feels like cut-rate classical music impersonations thrown over cut-rate power/melodic metal as gimmick. I've heard better things about Therion, but they haven't really clicked with me either. Same with Arcturus.

Maybe you'll dig this. Personally, I think it sounds like some band was drunk and decided to make tongue-in-cheek opera metal for a laugh, recorded it, but decided to take it seriously for some odd reason when they woke up.

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VEGANGELICA

Thanks for the suggestion!

I agree with you that Arcturus sounds like some drunk band that made tongue-in-cheek opera metal, and I didn't like it.

I went back to the "Black Symphony" and listened to the next movement after the overture. Alas, it had the main "Within Temptation" female singer singing some simplistic, overly dramatic pop-like melody over fairly uninspired symphonic music, drums, and "metalish" electric guitar. It sounded like a very repetitive piece from a musical: a mix of pop and elevator music. I didn't like it at all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2NPZVAxcwU

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The Batlord

Like I said, symphonic metal is generally just a cheesy gimmick that gets boring after the age of 16. I guess Trans-Siberian Orchestra would be considered symphonic metal (everyone on Earth has heard "Christmas Over Sarajevo".) Never listened to any of their other songs though, so I can't say how good they actually are.

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Wpnfire

Haven't heard much symphonic metal at all but what I have heard is...well, cringe-worthy. The Batlord covered what I was going to say basically.

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Dks12

I agree with you that Arcturus, lol. Weird

mythsofmetal

Blind Guardian has done some great power metal with heavy symphonic representation recently.

Here're five from their last two albums which are particularly interesting (though the two from the album At the Edge of Time are really the only two on that album that are as symphonic, while pretty much all of Beyond the Red Mirror, including the song "At the Edge of Time" are very symphonic.)



There's also some pretty good extreme metal with symphonic elements, but the arrangements aren't always quite as complex, since it's mostly one or two band members laying down the best of what they could, and I'm pretty sure that they don't quite have the experience of professional conductors, so might be better called metal with symphonic elements/instrumentation since some of it, like; Mondstille apparently don't have a whole symphony backing it. However, of these, I think Carach Angren sounds pretty large in their sound, enough to fool a person into thinking a dozen or maybe more were behind this when it was really one or two people doing all the orchestral-like stuff. I could also see it being seen as kinda cheesy, but I think it's worth giving it a brief try.




Then of course there's the "synth-phonic" () album Time I by Wintersun, which has all computer-generated orchestrations for those parts, so the tones/timbres of them may not be so enjoyable to some, but it's quite complex and may be enjoyable to some here, (I know I enjoy it quite a lot, though I've seen quite a lot of vitriol thrown its way from people on Metal-Archives.)

Trollheart

Everyone here hates Kamelot, not sure why, but these are two of my favourite tracks from them. The first is not too symphonic, but I think you might enjoy it for its sentiments as Roy Khan (vocalist) wrote it for his newborn baby. The second is one of their best and has some fine symphonic elements to it.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018