The HARD ROCK & HEAVY METAL Thread Continued

I grew up playing drums to heavy metal/acid rock or whatever you wanted to call it. We played deep purple, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix and others hard rock material.

Today, I mostly listen to jazz/blues/hard rock and progressive rock.

The group I listen to 99% of the time if I’m paying heavier stuff, is Dream Theater. If you want to listen to them, look at their Images and Words album from the 80’s and then listen to their latest song Night Terror. Awesome! Lots of YouTube videos on them too. The best songs from them are when Mike Portnoy was the drummer(voted best drummer many times) 80’s thru 2011 and he just came back this year and they released Night Terror

Moterhead is another group I play a lot of these days.

https://open.qobuz.com/track/99717259
WoFat, “Analog Man”.

I am a pretty big fan of certain subgenres of metal.

But I don't like them specifically because they are metal bands, but because they appeal to the attributes that I love in the music I listen to. 

Those attributes I love in music are (no particular order): very high levels of musicianship, complexity, deep and broad range of emotional and/or content conveyed, (usually) long form song structure, no need to have "catchy" melodies, no need for verse>chorus>bridge song structure. 

For me, the above attributes supersede any specific genre. Once the above attributes are met, I am almost genre "agnostic".  

The metal bands I like have most or all of the above attributes. 

Progressive metal - Haken, Pain of Salvation, Riverside, Wolverine, Opeth, Caligula's Horse, Lemur Voice, Suncaged, and others.

Technical metal - Cynic, Spastic Ink, Tesseract, The Contortionist, Zero Hour, Anomaly, Atheist, Spiral Architect, Counter-World Experience, Meshuggah, Animals as Leaders, and others.  

Rush - 2112

Queensryche - Road to Madness