Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums Of All Time

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• Publisher: Ecw Press Digital
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781554902453
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The result of an extensive poll asking heavy metal fans to list their favouritealbums, this compendium combines those surveys with Popoff's original interviews with world famous rockers who reveal recording session secrets in addition to their own heavy classics and ear-splitting faves. With reviews of early metal albums of the 1960s, as well as the latest hits, this essential resource blends praise with criticism to give an honest assessment of the most influential and important heavy metal recordings.

1 MASTER OF PUPPETS / Metallica

6585 points (Elektra ’86)

Greatest heavy metal record of all time, you say, and man, Master of Puppets has been deemed so by a skull-fryingly large margin. Alas, Metallica found themselves third-time lucky with this celebrated song-heavy symphony of scrapes. And I do mean third: Kill ’Em All was instantly recognized as the work of a band with more fire in the belly than anything flashing fast as of yet. Ride the Lightning was a completely unexpected and pleasantly surprising step up in sophistry for the band (and my superlatives belong there, for I personally think it’s a bolder creative triumph than Master). Ergo, there you go: Metallica had arrived — at least in the hearts of us grim underground pounders — long before Master of Puppets arrived. They were the best at the newly intensified metal sound: the fastest guns, the youngest of spirit, the most optimistic of possibility. Strange year, 1986. Bad year, really. Metal was in a malaise, adrift, a transition. Indeed, playing Master, one surmises (without denying its brilliance) that it feels like the work of a more exciting year, say 1984. As a result, it is 1986’s industry-eclipsing highlight, a ruthless piece of work when nothing and nobody was working too successfully on a creative level. The album succeeds first through the forceful midriff-pounding cannons of Fleming Rasmussen’s merciless midrange tones. There is a crowd, center-stage, at the front, the space between band and fan compressed, diminished, erased. In this hotspot, the Bay Area’s favorite denim-clad devils go about their business thrashing the daylights inside and out of the new extreme metal, recasting it as something one is able to process and make pleasurable; the thrash is compacted, impacted, punky but crafted to a puerile polish by the quick right hand of Hetfield. And speaking of James, what you got out of his booze-splashed craw was a vocal that was simultaneously extreme and personable, a sort of redneck howl from a guy that was cognizant of his genre’s quandary with respect to the fragile balance between anguished vocal-chord grinding and the minefield of melody. So there he was, croaking and crooning his way through an assortment of large, dry, loveable songs, each an anthem (save for anthem-abdicating instrumental Orion), each deliberately dotting a plectrumed place on the thrash landscape, from the old-school blast of Battery and Damage, Inc., down through stuffed-full metal mannas like the title track and Disposable Heroes, decelerating now through the shaggy crags of The Thing That Should Not Be and Leper Messiah, wasting away at the restless resting place of Welcome Home (Sanitarium). Of course, that isn’t the record’s sequence (Master of Puppets is organized cagier than that. Synopsis: run in, run out), but that exercise gives you a sense of how much ground is covered on this album, all with an impressive unity that makes you forget the little bits of production — f’rinstance, the fact that the record begins with acoustic guitar. So there you have it . . . but it’s not exactly tidy. You have what is now the dominating metal band on the planet, making their third great record in a year neither here nor there for the genre as a whole, with the real, fresh, virginal excitement already having run its course over the two records the band had already released. Master of Puppets is also the work of a band that has lost, in a disheartening gradual slide over a long half of its long existence, a lot of its good will with the fans. Still, it won the whole damn thing, pointing to a maturity in our poll respondents to put aside the value-shifting vagaries of the sands of time and reward pure, unadulterated headbanging done righter than right.

Lars Ulrich on Master of Puppets . . .

“It’s kind of interesting talking about your previous records when you are in the middle of making another one; it’s like different perspectives. But Master of Puppets, in some way, is probably the most concise one of the first four. With Lightning, we were starting to shape our sound. With Justice, we took it too far. But Master of Puppets is the most concise of those . . . for better or worse, the most concise. To have it considered No. 1 is obviously a pretty amazing thing. I have a lot of respect for that record. It’s difficult for me to rate them. I can’t say Master of Puppets is better or worse than any of those records — they each are completely their own thing. Master of Puppets is obviously the record where it started breaking. When I think of that record I’ll always think of the Ozzy tour, the stage set with the crosses; I’ll always think of Cliff. Any time anybody asks me about records there’s all these memories that come into play. And you know, I know this is like the oldest cliché in the book, but those records become time capsules; they become mile markers of your past. When I think of that record I think of being in Denmark drinking Danish beer, all this shit [laughs], recording at Sweet Silence. I realize now, sort of two-thirds of the way through making a new record . . . we sat around today with our manager and talked about a bunch of stuff and it’s really hard to objectify or be objective about our own stuff. I let other people rant and rave about the merits of the records and give opinions, but I have to say it’s a record that I’m incredibly proud of. It seemed to just sort of come together. We were honing it on Lightning, and Puppets came the closest to a bull’s-eye for that type of stuff. And then on Justice, I think it became too bloated and too introverted.”

2 THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST / Iron Maiden

4760 points (EMI ’82)

In some manner, The Number of the Beast is less of a confident rock-starry thing versus the anchored heft of Killers. There’s a frantic quality that points to the naiveté of the debut, perhaps fueled by the cracked-open world of wonders that presented itself through the acquisition of a lead-singing, finger-pointing, pint-sizing dynamo in leg warmers called Bruce Dickinson. But three records runnin’, Maiden’s advantage was their track-to-track variation, each anthem an island, many with a nugget of novelty (look to spiffy intros and look to well-defined themes), all featuring a chemistry born of the band’s odd, fat-stringed leadership structure. Lowlife lowlights for me are the two most popular songs, Run to the Hills and the sweet-and-sour title track, but much of the rest steams and redeems — The Prisoner, 22 Acacia Avenue and bristling, bustling epic Hallowed Be Thy Name being particularly . . . crafty.

Bruce Dickinson on The Number of the Beast . . .

“I’m not sure it’s still the favorite, but it is certainly the most notorious. What’s that word? It’s a ‘seminal’ album [laughs]. In other words, it’s the album that really started the whole darn thing in the eyes of a lot of the people on the planet. And while diehard Maiden fans know the thing was well underway with the first couple of records, the third album of any band is always kind of a make-or-break situation. If the band is doing really well with its first and second albums, and doesn’t do a great third album, there’s a kind of profound sense of disappointment that very often may mean the beginning of the end. But a really great third album can kick everything into gear, and in our case it was a great record. That really set the scene for the albums that followed. I mean, likely for us, we followed it up with an album that in my opinion, is actually better. But of course, albums are no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• The List
• Appendices
• About the Author
• PRAISE
• Copyright