Metal Monday: Metal Essentials – Heavy Metal
posted in: Features
If a person is to consider themselves a metalhead, they had best know the roots”the basics. Be aware of all subgenres, who dominates them and know the albums that helped shape that subgenre. For the next few weeks, I’ll be schooling you on some essential metal albums from metal’s biggest subgenres ”making sure you know the biggest and the best in the metal world and giving you some essential albums to add to your metal collection.
Up this week is the father of all metal, the original: Heavy Metal
Starting this “essentials” list with anything other than a Black Sabbath album would almost be metal blasphemy. The first album on the list is Black Sabbath‘s 1970 classic, Paranoid. While it is not their first album, it is by far their most famous, and best exemplifies the band’s sound, including their most enduring songs over the years, “Iron Man” and “War Pigs.” Paranoid shaped the mold for the sound that a vast majority of doom metal bands would use in the future, and legitimized heavy metal as a viable genre of music.
The next album is an album that isn’t really what most people consider heavy metal, but it was undeniably one of the most important albums in the way that metal came to be: Deep Purple‘s 1972 killer, Machine Head. From the galloping rhythms, the raw vocals, the simple riffs, the lengthy guitar and keyboard solos ”all things that have been adapted from hard rock and southern rock as the foundations of metal as we know it. Let’s also not forget the most played riff in the history of guitar is featured on this album (you know, the opening to “Smoke on the Water”). Machine Head is certainly the best bridge to the gap between the Cream-era rock ‘n’ roll and the style that’s featured with the next album on this list.
As the popularity of the first wave of British Heavy Metal (Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, etc.) waned, another monster was in the making”what we know as The New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Our next album was right on the cusp of this movement: Motí¶rhead‘s 1979 monster Overkill. Motí¶rhead brought something new to the metal community, unprecedented levels of speed. Laying the groundwork for the next big wave of music to coming along (thrash metal), Motí¶rhead encompassed all that metal would come to be known as: loud, fast, unruly” and most importantly ” heavy.
These 3 great, must-have albums helped kick-start the metal revolution. If you already know and love these albums, give them another listen (they deserve it). If you somehow have never heard these albums, go to your nearest record store and buy them immediately (or download off iTunes, or ask a friend, whatever your means of acquiring music is).
Class dismissed.