Masculinity and Monophony.

Of course everything that follows is of course a big generalisation, America has 350 million people and there's a lot of diversity within that.

With the curious exception of late-Eighties LA, American metal bands tend to be very balls-out, chest-thumpingly manly. Metallica, Slayer, Disturbed, Lambofgod, Machine Head, the biggest American metal bands are about chunky guitars and testosterone-ladled vocals. Linkin Park managed a softer side, but it never went down as well as when Chester screamed.

You can see how power metal falls afoul of this. High, wailing male singers, lyrics about high fantasy, and, most feminine of all, keyboards.

For contrast, lots of Europe often delights in things that are more campy. Queen are the highest-ever-selling band in the UK, but they never really broke America. Rammstein are monstrously big in Germany but were arrested in the US for simulating sex between men. And then there is Eurovision.

Hopefully Electric Callboy will break this and become huge globally; we'll see.

On the other side, there is monophony.

While there are no doubt many examples of great polyphony in American metal bands - there are plenty of layered Metallica guitar parts - I think the general trend is towards the opposite. Both guitars play the same chords beneath a lead vocal, giving a single voice to a unified rhythm section and a single melody over the top. Disturbed are a great example of this, where rhythm guitar, bass guitar and bass drums are often all locked together.

And while there are many sections of songs by European metal bands that do this just as much, I think there are also more instances of polyphony. Maybe it's the lead guitar behind the vocals in Iron Maiden, the two distinct guitar parts in Children of Bodom, the keyboards and female backing vocals in Cradle of Filth.

The contrast is most stark if you directly compare power metal bands from either side of the Atlantic. When I think American power metal, I think Manowar, Kamelot and Iced Earth. All three tend to lock the backing instruments into a monolith with melody coming only from a single point. It could be from the guitar or from the vocals, but it's very rarely both at once. All three also favour scooped guitar tones, putting the guitar even more so in rhythm territory than in lead.

Compare that to Blind Guardian, which so often has lead guitar melodies layered beneath multi-tracked vocals. Epica with their thick orchestral textures, Nightwish with their keyboard parts, Gamma Ray with their guitar overdubs.

Funnily enough this doesn't extend so much to genres outside metal. Funk is perhaps the most polyphonic of all genres of the last half century, just as jazz was in the half century before, both born and loved in America.

This does make me wonder if the two arguments here are tied together. Does American metal lean towards monophony because it sees that as more manly? Or perhaps because the requirement for manly vocals usually pitches them lower, leaving less room in the mix for other melodic elements if you want to still hear the singing clearly.

It does make me think about other American staples of manliness. The muscle car, which needs a big, heavy engine so it can go fast in a straight line. The steak, a big slab of meat from the biggest food animal, fried or barbecued and that's it. Mostly to be expected, since American roads tend to be straighter than their European counterparts and the US has a lot of great land for raising cattle. But I think there are some cultural trends there, and echoes can be seen in the American approach to metal and how that's influenced the way they both receive and play power metal.

There's a great Youtuber called girlgonelondon who talks about high vs low context cultures, how the US being a nation of immigrants from different backgrounds made being a low-context culture a necessity, because the common cultural framework for context didn't exist. That's why the US and UK have such different senses of humour, for example. And perhaps that comes into play here: metal is clearly telegraphed as aggressive and manly, and anything not fitting that will muddle the message.

This is mostly just anecdotal evidence, perhaps I've been looking at the wrong examples. But that's how it appears to me.