Introduction, explanation...and D'erlanger!

Welcome to my blog that will explore metal singles of the 1990s. I mostly listen to metal with clean vocals, which is what I think of as traditional metal. So here I'll talk about heavy metal, speed metal, power metal, and glam metal.

Although I mostly gravitate toward metal of the 1980s, I decided to focus on the '90s here for a few reasons:

• I was born in 1975, and no metal was played in my house until I started playing it myself in the early '90s. So although I heard a lot of '80s metal in the '90s, I was mostly focused on new music back then, and '80s metal is something I had to learn about later on when I became more interested in it.
• Metal faded in popularity during the '90s, so there's a lot less to talk about. Trying to talk about all the metal in the '80s seemed too daunting a task, even though I love it!
• Metal was going in lots of interesting directions by the time the '90s started, so it will be interesting to look at different sections that had formed and were continuing to form--and I'll only be focusing on a few of them!
• Most of my favorite '80s bands were still going strong in the '90s, so I'll get to talk about them a lot!

Also, I'll be focusing on singles rather than albums, simply because it will be a much easier task. I'll be using metal-archives.com as my guide. And this won't be a review blog, just a celebration of metal! And I'll only include songs that I can find on YouTube, to make things easier.

So I'll start with one of the first singles of the '90s.

D'erlanger - Darlin' (January 25, 1990)

This isn't the most metal single to start the blog with! But I love Japanese visual kei and listen to it every day, so it seems appropriate. D'erlanger was very much a metal band in the mid-80s and then morphed into a goth-rock/post-punk band by the '90s. This track has a fast goth-pop/post-punk sound and reminds me a little bit of The Teardrop Explodes, only faster and more...Japanese.

This was track 6 of their sophomore album Basilisk (March 7). D'erlanger started releasing metal demos in 1984 and were very experienced by 1990, but they weren't added to a major record label until after they became a goth rock band. So they were really going places at this time, when Germany's Ariola Records picked them up. 

Since the lyrics are in Japanese, I assume the video for "Darlin'" was played mostly on Japanese TV and wasn't seen much by Western audiences until YouTube came along.

 

 Not a very metal start, but it will get better!