Epica fans here?

Anyone here fans of symphonic metal gods EPICA here?
I absolutely love this band(and am IN love with Simone Simon's *swoon*). I own all but two of their albums and am stoked for their new one due out early next year(assuming the NWO INGSOC totalitarian take over apocalypse doesn't prevent it from happening). They just get better and better with 3 each release. My favorite right now is *the holographic principle* though before that album came out *the divine conspiracy* or *design your universe* was probably my fave. What is your favorite album by them? Picking a favorite for me is often contingent on what their newest release as they get better and better every release.
I absolutely love their combining of several subgenres in one...symphonic with thrash with death metal and even black metal moments, just absolutely GENIUS! Simone's vocals...just...a goddess! And their lyrical subject matter is some of the most thought provoking and inspiring in the metal genre(or any genre).
I cannot heap enough praise on this band!

I'm an oldschool death metal/thrash metal and black metal and classic heavy metal fan primarily, especially the heavier subgenres. Epica is actually the only band of this genre I own any albums from(well, I have one Nightwish album). That's how incredible they are to me.

Anyone else here as in love with these guys?

Also, curious? Are there any Christian bands similar....and of the same caliber?

May Epica live forever!

Epica would be a good band for me if it wasn't for those female operatic vocals. That kind of vocals kills all interest in the music for me sadly. But well, there's a huge market for that kind of thing out there, so I'll probably be wrong

Andreas89 wrote:Epica would be a good band for me if it wasn't for those female operatic vocals. That kind of vocals kills all interest in the music for me sadly. But well, there's a huge market for that kind of thing out there, so I'll probably be wrong

As an oldschool metalhead who has loved trash, death metal, black metal, and Maiden and Priest and A.Cooper type classical heavy metal for over 30 years now. When I first heard such bands like Epica with female soprano vocals and orchestral elements only about 15 years or so ago, at first I was reticent about such stuff, open, but reticent. If the younger me in my teens had heard it...he...I would've hated it and thought it to be sm abomination in metal, lol! But as I've gotten older I've learned to appreciate such art in metal. And while I don't listen to many bands of this nature(though I've always liked symphonic black metal bands since I discovered them in the early 2000s, along with raw BM)...its grown on me. It's an acquired taste for oldschool metalheads for sure. But something about Epica stands out for me above all other bands of that subgenre, there's something absolutely amazing about them, such talent and uniqueness, such heaviness in the midst of such beauty...a unification of opposites in sound that is so appealing to me for some reason. Such EPICness(hence the name of the band). And it doesn't hurt that Simone is also such a fox, lol!
I get those metalheads that don't really like operatic vocals and/or symphonic or orchestral elements in their metal though. I understand that viewpoint, used to hold the same viewpoint till my late 20s.

As you can see in my tag, I'm the power metal guy around these parts. And I am by no means an old school metalhead, even though I enjoy myself some metal classics occasionally. But for me, metal only really started to take shape around 1997 with the combination of the traditional metal revival spearheaded by HammerFall (Glory to the Brave) and newcomers and innovators like Rhapsody and Sonata Arctica. Even the more or less established melodic metal bands only started to crank out their best works around that time (Blind Guardian, Gamma Ray, Stratovarius).

As a matter of fact I love classical elements in my metal music, from the additional instrumentation to the performance of vocalists as long as the vocalists are male. There's just something about female classical vocals that puts me off big time, at least when it spans an entire album. And as you more or less mention, the majority of the bands are way too much about the appearance of the vocalist (their vocal talent notwithstanding). Put all this together and in the end I'm put off by both the music and the singer's appearance. Yes really.