Talk:Chorbo

Obviously Chorbo is itself a send-up immediately similar to Spın̈al Tap—complete with ridiculous founding story, a previous name, a major retooling (or two!) of musical style, a "black album" scandal and ridiculous antics by the members. Chorbo tends to focus more closely on a specific style of heavy metal called New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and they arrived a bit later on the scene.

The genesis of Chorbo is similar to the story of many things in the Carl Bird universe: happenstance. In this case, it was a random turn of phrase by a friend of mine. He made a Facebook post several years ago riffing on some random band names and one of them was "Chorbo". It hit me like lightning: "this sounds like the name of a heavy metal band that sings about heroic deeds and muscular barbarians!" Thus, Chorbo was born.

As an aside, looking for examples of this sort of music threw me down a YouTube rabbit hole that I've been deep into for almost a decade now. There is a frankly stupefying amount of heavy metal out there that I would classify as NWOBHM. Some of it is absolutely amazing, some of it is terrible, but the important point that cannot be understated is: there is a lot of it, and it can all be found on YouTube with a little digging. I have made a special category for my own purposes: "NWOBHM that was released between 1982–1985 (inclusive)", as almost all of the examples fall between those years. If you go a bit later than '85 and things start sounding a bit like hair metal, or the production values start shifting to more polish/commercial appeal. And if you go earlier than '82, you can still find some decent examples but they're fewer and further between. Some of these records are terrible, but many are astonishingly good. Most have nevertheless been almost entirely lost to time, surviving through YouTube uploads maintained by a small cult of early-to-mid-1980s heavy-metal enthusiasts—which is itself a particularly small subset of cult music fandom. This overlooked second and third tier of NWOBHM is the territory in which Chorbo most naturally belongs.

Truth be told, this sort of music is probably the nearest and dearest to my heart. The visual design language of a medieval warrior or monster, an "Old English" sort of font to write the band or album name, and the musical styling of loud, tight guitar harmonies, aggressive drumming, Hammond organ, and higher-register vocals is my default. Even though I love a fairly wide variety of music, if I started a heavy metal band, it would be Chorbo.

Membership timeline rough draft