Nightmarer

“A non-metal listening friend of mine recently posited a question that I’ve been pondering over the past week: ‘Are there any metal bands that aren’t heavy?’ For a moment I was puzzled because he wasn’t referring to aesthetics, but rather to the use of the term as a genre qualifier. I briefly explained how ‘heavy’ can be used in either instance and, at that moment, I was struck with the irony that, with metal’s myriad offshoot genres, the two uses rarely coexist. We use the term ‘heavy metal’ to categorize bands like Iron Maiden, but is Maiden really heavier than, say, Incantation? Wouldn’t the descriptor be more apt, then, to classify bands that we currently refer to as death metal? When stacked against a band that fucks around as little as Nightmarer, arbitrary genre tags are proven moot. Call them heavy metal, death metal, doom/death, whatever; these Floridians play heavy goddamn metal.” Heavy, man.