I'm one of them young fellers into all kinds of crazy stuff. Well, not that crazy. I started out as a teen kind of liking metallica, but wanted some orchestra thrown in and some pure metal taken out (I think the awesomeness that is No Leaf Clover was my epiphany). My girlfriend introduced me to Dream Theater, which I still like to this day. One day I was browsing youtube watching fan videos for Babylon 5 (awesome sci-fi, btw), heard portions of a song I liked, and went on the internet to (totally legally) download more songs by this peculiar artist (Nightwish). I found a few kind of crappy ones and a few good ones, until I found a few really good ones. I went out and bought a couple CDs, still love them ever since. Since then I've also gotten a bit into Epica
All of Nightwish's CDs are a bit different. All of them are quite symphonic, a few are borderline gothic but most are simply metal. The band itself is Finnish, lead singer (Female, definitely operatic) was phenomenal (replaced recently by someone I'm not so much a fan of), male vocals are ok. Epica is from the netherlands and is a little more girly... Not at all a fan of the male vocalist, but you can't really have everything, can you?