If we need major chord slow happy metal, I want to see some gory/epic/fast emo songs, that make me feel like running through the woods. Or something that makes you feel strong, and ready to charge into battle. Or invokes a winter storm.
That, friend, would be asking far too much.
I do agree, however, that there could very well be some whiny emo band that just writes songs so well and kicks so much ass that even the Norsk Arysk Black Metal guys would listen to it, but they just didn't make it because they didn't have just the right image.
Everything is image nowadays. John Mayer's seemingly "plain" t-shirt and jeans image had been carefully crafted by a marketing exec somewhere. Those are $200 dollar jeans, and t-shirts with just the right slogan or image.
I don't want more "image" thrown in my face. I know full well that the radio sucks the past few years. The biggest competitor of new bands are the bands that had hits in the 70's and 80's, who may not even be around anymore. There's a lot of good music that doesn't get played on the radio, just as there is a lot of bad music that does.
I just get the feeling that I've already heard all the best metal to come out since the earliest days of the genre, and everyone else is just imitating that at less-than-equal quality. I could just as well go listen back to the great metal I've found, than wade through the piles and piles of shitty metal that is flooding the market, trying to find that one great band.
I've heard all of the power-metal, and it became stale, so I moved on to progressive, and death, and black, and doom, and so on and so forth until I've come to the point where unless something really really amazing and fresh hits my ears, I just want to switch genres for a while.
It could be jazz, rap, emo, whatever... it just so happens to be simple ass radio rock right now. It's not that I want to hear only "popular" music, because the best "pop" band probably never made it on any wide scale. I just am grasping to hear something different, anything, whatever it may be.
When that one special album comes out that puts be into a metal fit, I'll buy it, but I've waited nearly 2 years now, and I've listened to whatever I can get in my ears, and very little has had enough "new" to keep me interested.
I'm just tired out on metal I s'pose. I'm not saying I outgrew it, just that I've pumped it into my ears for so long now that it's worn out it's welcome for a while.
If I do listen to metal, I put on some "old standby" Pantera or Iced Earth or something, never anything new. I envy the kid who's never heard metal in his life and hears that one perfect song that is like "holy shit I've never heard anything like that". It probably won't even be a very lame ripoff band recycling a Metallica riff or something, but he won't know that. To him it'll be the first time, like when I heard Iron Maiden for the first time.
But if he's like me, after a while, no matter how many different genres of metal he listens to, he's going to want to take a break, and for me that means going to the diametric opposite:
Radio pop.
It's catchy enough that I stuck around long enough to figure out which bands I like and don't, and it's easily listenable and since I'm studying studio recording it's nice to study the production.
When I get tired of it, I'll move back to metal or onto emo or something else, I just wish there were more metal bands that did something so new that it made metal feel fresh again, which I know is easier said than done.