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 of musical style, 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.