It seems pretty clear, though, that the chorus of “Victoria’s Secret” from their third album runs in a similar vein. Subsequent examples are a little harder to identify, because he doesn’t explicitly talk about them, and it would be generous to commend all of their bad lyrics as ironic. Inevitably, many listeners took this song seriously, and he had to explain in several interviews that he was just playing. Vocalist Tony Kakko described some of the examples of heavy metal songs he was presented with as a, “lyrical waste bucket,” but included his version of “true metal lyrics” on the opener to their second album, “Weballergy”. Sonata Arctica's fell into this jaded-but-humorous vein in a similarly jaded-but-humorous fashion: after their first album, the band were criticized for writing songs that weren’t True Metal. That’s great, who wouldn’t cringe at four consecutive lines finished with “high”, “fly”, “sky” and “by”? Dream Theater’s “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence” covers the feelings of those afflicted by Bipolar Disorder, PTSD, Schizophrenia and a number of other conditions.
Others will pick complicated psychological or historical concepts, but then use simplistic and jarring rhymes. A placebo is not a drug and often has a positive effect, which doesn’t fit with their standpoint on religion, but a series of ten-to-fifteen-letter words cover up the messy analogy. They were apparently trying to express that religion is like “a placebo, a drug that has no actual effect”. “Great archaic obsoletum / A prevarication / Deceitfully contrived”, goes Meshuggah’s “Nostrum”. When asked in interviews, songwriters are vague and incoherent about what they were actually trying to say. Some bands dress up their writing with long words, but anyone with a thesaurus can write long words. Bands who want to focus on the music maintain lyrical genre conventions or distort the vocals so the listener can ignore what the vocalist is saying. Death metal bands write about death, black metal bands about despair, power metal bands about fantasy and so on.
For the most part, metalheads accept boring lyrics.
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