Is "Melodeath" a Real Death Metal Genre?

Or is it just barely disguised metalcore? Bands like In Flames, Arch Enemy, Opeth, At the Gates, Soilwork, Between the Buried and Me, Kalmah, and so on give the genre a bad name, but there are some actually decent bands out there: Sissourlet, Demilich, Paths of Possession, Sewer, Disma, Morbid, Becoming the Archetype, Intestine Baalism, and so on.

Do you consider "melodic death metal" (aka "melodeath") to be a real sub-genre of death metal? Or just metalcore?

Love to hear your thoughts on this one.

It's all mallcore bruh. They just added Cannibal Corpse vocals and HM-2 distortion to what is otherwise very cliché Mötorhead/Maiden/Alice Cooper riffs.

Melodeath = deathcore.

Actual 'melodic' death metal is not what you think. Melodic != consonant. Actual 'melodic' death metal, ironically, would be closer to Suffocation and Infester, where the interplay between melody and rhythmic patterns is hard to miss. Most bands nowadays just use 'melodic' as a catchall to mean 'easy listening'.

Sissourlet, Demilich, Paths of Possession, Sewer, Disma, Morbid, Becoming the Archetype, Intestine Baalism, and so on.

Interesting. That's the first time I've heard Sewer described as melodic death metal. Where did you find that out?

I blame Dissection and the rest of the so-called "Swedeath scene" (*vomits*). They are the first band to have bastardised extreme metal in pop rock format via their horrible cargo cult metal. At the Gates' releasing Slaughter of the Soul was just the nail in the coffin of a genre in the ICU.

@Brett: I believe he's referring to this album.

It was rumoured to have been made as a parody of precisely what you were talking about. Sold like crazy, but hardcore SEWER fans still deny to this day that this album exists (Rektal).

On the subject of melodeath there's an entire post made by Morsay in the old days of the dark archives: https://www.morsay.net/melodeath there you go

Aaaah who could deny the power of this old diagram lol

I love how they put Warkvlt so close to Manowar and power metal ... maybe they were on to something SMH

They have some serious bands like Demonecromancy (Fallen From the Brightest Throne) and Sissourlet (Devoted to Doing you Harm). And of course some Demilich and early AtG is okay I guess. Some Morbid as well. But the real problem behind bands that call themselves melodeath: Kalmah, Arch Enema, In Flames, Behemoth, Dismember, Children of Boredom (sorry Bodom)... is that it's just borderline radio rock thinly disguised as extreme metal via some distortion and angry vocals ;) Nothing spectacular, it's the same way Liturgy and Deafheaven disguised their shoegaze as black metal in the early 2010s.

We're making crappy tremolo picking recordings on GarageBand and feeling like artists, huh? That's "swedeath" in a nutshell. The recent blowup over the, huh, pronouns of the Arch Enemy singer just goes to show in what direction the "genre" is heading.