Epic doom
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Doom with operatic vocals and solemn lyrics. Candlemass set the template on their first album.
How it sounds
- Operatic vocals in the tenor or baritone range, with broad vibrato.
- Majestic riffing with long chords and guitar harmonies.
- Solemn structures and lyrics about fate, death and mythology.
Hear what that means
- An operatic voice over two chords from 37:29
At 60 bpm with a static riff, something has to carry the melody, and a trained singer with range gives the arrangement somewhere to go.
Open on YouTube at 37:29 - Where the genre starts
Candlemass - Epicus Doomicus Metallicus
Monumental slow riffs written to leave harmonic room for a very large vocal. The template for everything filed under epic doom.
Open on YouTube - The American answer
Solitude Aeturnus - Into the Depths of Sorrow
The same grandeur with a harder edge and a singer working at the top of his range throughout.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 60-100 bpm
- Song length
- 6-10 min
- Tuning
- C or D standard on heavy strings, with the guitars voiced to leave harmonic room for a very large vocal.
- Production
- Grand and reverberant, closer to a classical recording than to a metal one. The vocal is mixed as the lead instrument, which almost nothing else on this branch does.
- Written about
- Myth and legend, Fate, Death, heroically, Medieval and classical subjects
What each part is doing
- Vocals An operatic tenor or baritone with real training, singing across the full register. Messiah Marcolin's delivery is the genre's defining sound and its highest technical demand.
- Guitar Slow, monumental riffs with long sustain, written to support a voice rather than to compete with it. Twin harmonies arrive for the choruses.
- Bass Following the guitar for weight, and stepping out during the vocal passages where the guitars drop back.
- Drums Slow and ceremonial, with crashes timed to the vocal phrases rather than to the riff. The kit is playing an arrangement.
What it isn't
That the operatic vocal is metal being pretentious. It is a solution to a real problem: at 60 bpm with two chords, something has to carry the melodic interest, and doom's usual answer — a plain sung voice — leaves the music static. A trained singer with range gives the arrangement somewhere to go, which is why the genre's best records are the ones with the best singers on them.
Told apart from
- Doom metal Epic doom is doom with an operatic singer and a grander arrangement. Doom proper is bleaker, more blues-derived and much less theatrical.
- Viking metal Both are slow, mythological and use layered clean vocals. Viking metal comes from black metal; this comes from Sabbath.
- Power metal Power metal shares the trained voice and the fantasy subjects at four times the tempo. Slow it to a crawl and the two genres nearly meet.
- Funeral doom Funeral doom removes the melody, the singer and the tempo. Epic doom keeps all three and is the most listenable thing on the doom branch.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Candlemass released an album in 1986 whose title — macaronic Latin for 'epic doom metal' — named the subgenre outright. Messiah Marcolin, in his monk's cowl, became the genre's public image. The formula has barely changed since and needs no changing.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Neue Deutsche Härte 2.4 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- Grunge 3.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.