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My analytical tools make various otherwise-elusive questions easy to answer, so while I'm playing with heavy-metal data, here's another thing I wondered about: which bands have the narrowest and widest ranges of ratings? To answer this meaningfully I counted only releases that have 4 or more reviews, and only bands that have 4 or more of these releases and at least 10 different reviewers. For these I then averaged the ratings for each such release, and ran standard deviations on the sets of averages. So a low standard deviation means there's some consensus that the quality of the band's output is consistent. High means consensus that the quality varies widely.  

Here are 25 most consistent. "Spread" is the standard deviation, "Average" is the average rating of the releases used in the calculation.  

# Artist Spread Average
1Coroner 0.908 88.21
2Helstar 1.455 90.54
3Moonsorrow 1.676 89.98
4Dark Angel (US) 1.767 82.15
5Candlemass 1.842 89.78
6Lamb of God 1.845 68.5
7Obituary 2.004 85.32
8Type O Negative 2.035 89.16
9Accept 2.193 88.06
10Agent Steel 2.479 90.49
11Fates Warning 2.531 93.36
12Alice in Chains 2.538 88.83
13Iron Savior 3.025 88.25
14Falconer 3.083 84.42
15Therion (Swe) 3.159 90.38
16Sodom 3.294 83.4
17Kamelot 3.463 90.52
18Gorgoroth 3.496 84.71
19Judas Iscariot 3.602 89.03
20Bolt Thrower 3.652 88.31
21Suffocation (US) 3.701 86.48
22Angra 3.758 88.63
23Enslaved (Nor) 3.926 88.85
24Vader 4.162 85.78
25Bal-Sagoth 4.249 89.9
 

I sense a hastily-assembled cash-in Coroner boxset in our future. I think this also means that Fates Warning is the most consistently great band in all of heavy metal. So now we know. And Lamb of God gets some sort of weird prize for being the most consistently mediocre.
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