If you avoid metal on principle, you are missing out on a large number of talented musicians, an even larger number of good bands, and a smaller number of individual works of world-class art that transcend their genre. That's probably true of every genre you don't follow, of course, and I'm not going to argue that metal is, in general, inherently any more or less important or worthy than whatever else you could spend your time investigating. If I were drawing up a curriculum of moral philosophy in recent popular art, I'd be inclined to include Slayer's "Disciple", but not because I expect anybody to like it. At Slayer's end, one might reasonably contend, metal is stylized extremism, not exactly inimical to cogent social analysis or poetry, but hardly their most lucid medium. Discussions of metal as art are usually defenses of metal as art, and this meta-discussion tends to hijack what little discourse metal manages to engender, so that metal rarely manages to be about anything farther reaching than metal's right to be about something. Horror movies, video games and fantasy comics, at least, labor under their own versions of this same burden. It's the author's responsibility to understand that when they allow their art to be genre-identified, they accept the appearance of the constraints under which the genre is believed to operate. Mind you, opting out can be extremely difficult, and in fact in some cases genre-identification is deliberate sedition. Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead and all of Dororthy L. Sayers' later Lord Peter mysteries, to take two of my standing examples, are character novels couched in genre terms in order, it seems to me, to reach less self-conscious audiences. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, before it got irretrievably entangled in its own interior logic, was an audacious running allegory about the process of confronting adulthood, thinly disguised as a cheesy monster-of-the-week serial. If the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's Signs revealed the kind of movie it actually is, under its thriller veneer, it would never make back its budget.

When I say that Nightwish will not lead you into an addictive subculture, of course I am lying. There is an addictive subculture lurking behind every single thing you don't know, that's part of why ignorance is so enduringly popular. Fortunately, you have me, who has made it my life's work to pursue every avenue of diminishing returns until I'm in swamp up to my lower lip. If you like the effect of heavy metal with a technically adept female singer well enough to want more than one band's worth of albums of it, there are some other practitioners. Most of the ones I've found that resemble Nightwish most closely, I don't like nearly as much, probably because none of them are nearly as good as Nightwish at Nightwish's exact style, but around the borders with other styles I've found a few I like better. The German quartet Flowing Tears' arrangements are much darker and more straightforwardly metal than Nightwish's, lent atmosphere by lone (and basically rhythm) guitarist Benjamin Buss's judicious synth programming, and singer Stefanie Duchêne's muscular contralto (faintly reminiscent, at times, of Christina Amphlett or Siouxsie Sioux without the obvious quirks, or Shirley Manson without the processor suffocation) is clearly a rock voice, not a classical one. Flowing Tears have neither the exaggerated gothic bent of Lacuna Coil nor the hard-rock exuberance of Lullacry, and they're not a black-, death-, doom-, power- or speed-metal band, which leaves them, for me, in a weird and intriguing limbo between subgenres. They're one of the alternate metal futures that didn't happen in this universe, in which Queensrÿche freed metal from Black Sabbath's morbid pace and Voivod freed it from refurbished blues progressions, but none of the show-off lead-guitar or shrieking Euro-metal movements ever really caught on, and little girls grew up hoping to be Claudia Brücken not Terri Nunn, instead of Pat Benatar not Lita Ford. What's left is hypnotically mid-tempo heavy metal in an older sense of "heavy". If you can imagine Nightwish songs as Enya remixes, you can try thinking of Flowing Tears songs as Curve songs redone with the aim of making them just one maddening beat too slow to dance to. If you like dancing more than I do, this may not strike you as an improvement in the abstract, but I bet you'll still like it better than opera.

In theory, it seems to me like adding non-metal synths to heavy metal also ought to produce something I'd really enjoy. In practice, I often find that the combination turns out to be a novelty that doesn't wear well for me. I keep doggedly buying Paradise Lost albums, sure that the next one is going to be the breakthrough on which they stop sounding like Depeche Mode dressed for Halloween to me, but I now think Entwine (who are also Finnish, and do have a female member, but she's the keyboard player and doesn't sing) may be the band I've been wanting Paradise Lost to become. If that's true, then the trick to successfully incorporating extra sonics into metal songs turns out to be mostly not to, basically restricting them to brief, drifting intros and outros, and keeping them out of the way during the songs proper. The definitive demonstration here might be "The Pit", which opens with a muttering synth riff somewhere between drum & bass and Jean Michel Jarre, only to bury it after twenty seconds and launch into deadpan metal churn, a six-piece band doing their best to sound like a power trio. Most of the time, in fact, Entwine sound very much like Flowing Tears, the difference between Mika Tauriainen's male vocals and Duchêne's female ones discernible but not profoundly character-altering. I assume the occasional female vocals here (guest appearances by Saara Hellström of Finnish electronicists Neverwood) explain Entwine's own description of themselves as "gothic metal", but they don't seem especially gothic to me. Like Serpentine, Time of Despair is contained and of largely uniform tone, but a carefully managed emotional crescendo of sorts does climax in the throb of "Time of Despair" itself, the album's finale. "It's a heart of stone that beats inside", Tauriainen laments, but this is very nearly a paraphrase of Century Child, and unconvincing to me for exactly the same reasons. But maybe this is just a translation error. When Nightwish and Entwine claim to have lost faith and hope, I think what they've actually done is escaped the nagging sense that they have to be dissatisfied with their own lives. They call it "despair" because somebody told them that's the opposite of exultation, but when the exultation is hollow, the opposite is perspective. This music isn't sad, it's solid.

But if you want flighty, overblown, undignified, culturally suspect metal, either to ridicule or just because you like it, I've got some of that, too. Timo Kotipelto is usually the lead singer of Finnish symphonic-metal titans Stratovarius, who decided to take a year off pretty much exactly when I discovered them, but are set to begin mixing their new album two days from now. Kotipelto does not usually have a hand in writing Stratovarius's music or lyrics, so it was an open question what his "solo" album would consist of. To his credit, he wrote the music and lyrics for all dozen of these songs, produced them himself, and sang all lead and backing vocal parts. He sings well, the music has plenty of guitars and plenty of hooks, and his collaborators (including Stratovarius bassist Jari Kainulainen and Symphony X guitarist Mike Romeo) play well enough, and in the right idioms, to not alarm Stratovarius fans. Of course, the parts of Stratovarius songwriter Timo Tolkki's solo album that would probably alarm Stratovarius fans were the things I liked best about it. Tolkki's Hymn to Life was an interestingly flawed album with its own distinct identity and individual logic. Waiting for the Dawn is more or less a formal request for a review reading "Waiting for the year off to be over." At best, it is baldly ersatz Stratovarius. At worst (and part of the problem is that the record's best and worst are exactly the same), the whole project appears to have been executed under the not-so-inspirational mission statement "They're kids, maybe they don't know about Powerslave." Powerslave came out in 1984, and the first Stratovarius album was in 1989, so the math doesn't look entirely intractable. I, however, began listening to heavy metal somewhat earlier than that, and I'm doubly unlikely to forget about Powerslave because a) it was a damn good histrionic late-NWOBHM Iron Maiden album, and b) it is the inspiration for one of my Cardinal Rules of Heavy Metal, namely "I don't care how cool you think those headpieces look, you are not an Egyptologist. When we want a Northern European metal band's insights on the cultural milieu of Tutankhamen, we will come beat them out of you using your book-club edition of The Silmarillion." Plus, the whole Iron Maiden catalog was just re-released, so if the kids didn't know about Powerslave before, which is frankly unlikely, they're going to find out soon. Once they find out, they're going to hold these two albums up next to each other and wonder why the lawyers for the estate of whatever dead guy did the cover of Powerslave haven't sued the guy who did the cover of Waiting for the Dawn yet. (If they read the credits for both, they'll discover the only other explanation for the lack of legal action, which is that Powerslave artist Derek Riggs is just barely alive enough to rip himself off for money.) After the kids finish marveling over the covers, they're going to listen to both albums. The musical ingredients are as similar as the artwork. But Powerslave has "Aces High", "2 Minutes to Midnight", "Powerslave" and "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", four of the most lasting contributions to metal history by one of the genre's most influential bands. Waiting for the Dawn has a bunch of songs that nobody will remember by this time next year unless Kotipelto arrived back at band headquarters looking so pitiable that the band volunteered to learn one of his numbers for the next tour just to cheer him up. Why, if Kotipelto wanted a Powerslave of his own, he didn't simply do an Iron Maiden covers album, I can't imagine. Covers albums are in, it would have been easier, the lyrics would have been less awful, everybody would have been happy to hear him sing songs he loves, ripping off the art would have made sense, and it would have been a nice salute from one generation of melodic metal to another. And one day, when Kotipelto's kid pads into the living room and asks "Daddy, you didn't really once end an album with a gormless acoustic ballad called 'The Movement of the Nile', did you?", Timo would be able to look her in the eye and say "Brucette, my little albatross, you know your father would never play with such madness. Now go fetch your mother, the Omnichord and the Mr. Microphone, and we'll run through 'Bring Your Daughter...To the Slaughter' again while your breakfast burrito is defrosting."