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Aug. 4th, 2008 10:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Today's Song: Sins for the Gods by Saeko
So on my quest to compile a playlist of 100 different female-fronted metal bands, I eventually ran out of goth and symphonic metal acts. Granted, there are tons and tons of them, and granted, if I wanted to take my search to Myspace I could probably find another 100 that are obscure or unknown and even more generic and mediocre than some of the ones on my list (and I have to admit, there were a few on my list that are even on iTunes that I simply could not bring myself to download at all)... anyway, I had to turn to other forms of metal.
There are several good black and death metal acts with female vocalists, but women growling and shrieking isn't any more interesting to me than men doing that... the music that I actually listen to with that kind of vocals is all folk metal or viking metal or "melodic death metal", something that at least has melody in the music if not the actual vocals. Most death and black metal I can't listen to.
So... that led me to older styles of metal. Girlschool was an all-female NWOBM (New Wave of British Metal) band from the early 1980's. I already had a song of theirs, and they were fairly heavy... in a thrashy sort of way. And, of course, there's Feel So Bad, my favorite Japanese metal band which is mostly thrash-oriented but with a lot of different styles added on.
All of this led me to some other women who were early metal pioneers -- Doro, for example, full name Dorothee Pesch, female vocalist for the German heavy metal band Warlock in the 1980's and then of her own band Doro. Skew Siskin is another German hard rock / heavy metal band from the late 80's with a female vocalist. Bitch was a Los Angeles heavy metal band with a female vocalist ("Betsy Bitch") who were active as early as 1981. Their emphasis on whips and chains and S&M imagery made them one of Tipper Gore's primary targets, which naturally resulted in some useful publicity.
One of the biggest surprises for me in researching these ladies was the singer Saeko Kitamae, or just Saeko. Although she's a much more recent performer, her style of music is old-school heavy metal in the same vein as these other acts. What's really interesting is that the norm is for Japanese female singers to sing soft and "cute", and for idol stars to have everything about their music and performance arranged by someone else, so that the actual singers are almost interchangable -- but Sakeo sings in an in-your-face full-throated metal style that is very typical of metal but very atypical of female singers in Japan... and she performs her own music, backed up by a band she assembled herself.
Mind you, she moved to Germany to accomplish that... eh, it's still pretty impressive. And likely because she's based in Hamburg, you can find her music on iTunes.
Saeko -- Sins for the Gods
Saeko promo video for her first cd