A couple months ago, I saw John Petrucci, from Dream Theater, touring in support of his solo album Terminal Velocity. It was a great show. Opening was Meanstreak, whom I'd not heard of before. As it turns out, they were one of the first all-woman metal bands, though they've been inactive for many years. (And, as it also happens, three of the women in the band would eventually marry members of Dream Theater.)
After the show, I did a lot of reading about women in metal, my curiosity piqued. I'm not, generally speaking, a big metal-head, but I have enjoyed some music of that kind. I really like Mastodon's albums Blood Mountain and, especially, Crack the Skye, and of course King Crimson, one of my all-time favorite bands, inspired a lot of metal, especially on the more progressive end.
Eventually, I stumbled upon 'symphonic' metal: These bands are often fronted by women. If you haven't heard this stuff, it may sound almost impossible. And it's easy to imagine how mixing metal with symphonic elements could go horribly wrong (as, indeed, it sometimes does). But the best bands in this tradition are just amazing, and I've been blown away by Epica and Nightwish, especially, and frantically started collecting their albums on vinyl. As it happened, Epica was playing up in Boston (opening for Sabaton) just a couple weeks after I saw Petrucci, so my partner and I were able to see them.
There are a lot of other bands in this tradition, and I'm going to use the blog to record some thoughts about some of them.
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