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Metal @lemmy.world
Phenomephrene @thebrainbin.org

Can we get a FAVORITE ALBUMS roll call going?

I don't recall having seen this pop up in this community. Give a rundown of your favorite albums. Top slot, top 3, top 5, 10... whatever's easiest to you since I know it can be tough to narrow things down to a specific degree.

It'll be interesting to see where everyone is coming from in this regard. Could create for a good opportunity to discuss albums, find people with similar tastes, argue that a different album from someone's catalog is better, etc.

I'll throw mine down in a separate comment once I get it figured out.

65 comments

  • Dream Theater — Metropolis Part 2 is the best metal album ever written and I’ll die on the hill.

    There are albums I like more, albums I definitely listen to more, but if we’re talking overall quality Metropolis pt 2 is an absolute masterpiece.

  • I grew up downloading songs a la carte and now I use services like Spotify and YouTube Music, so I never paid much attention to albums as a whole.

    But there's a couple of standouts for me, albums I have listened all the way through multiple times, and they're both from Iron Maiden:

    • Rock in Rio live, 2001

    Most of my life, I thought concerts were stupid because I'd only been to ones at like, the county fair, with shitty country music from amateur cover artists on blown out speakers and surrounded by drunk and rowdy rednecks.

    This is the album that convinced me that live shows were worth seeing. In my opinion, this is the gold standard for live albums. I've never seen any other band with so many in their discography, and it makes me wish that other bands released more. But it makes sense: Iron Maiden has always been a show band first, and a studio band second.

    The crowd has the perfect amount of presence in the mix. Someome took the time to make sure you can always hear them, adjusting the levels so that they never drown out the band and vice versa. And you can feel how large the audience is. And they're total putty in Bruce's experienced hands.

    It inspires a real sense of community that I've come to crave from live shows, even as an introvert, and it helped kick off a life-long addiction.

    • Brave New World, 2000

    I think we can all agree that almost every album has a weak track or two. One that's just boring or doesn't fit with the rest, that seems just kind of thrown in.

    Not this album.

    This album heralded the triumphant return of lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith after 7 and 10 years, respectively.

    It's the first album with the full-bodied, punchy Iron Maiden sound that I've come to love. Instead of firing Janick Gers to make room for Smith, they just said "fuck it, let's have three guitarists," and it fucking works. And they still have the same lineup almost a quarter century later.

    Not every song is iconic, but they're all enjoyable, and several of them would end up being staples of their setlists going forward. (They also played many of them at Rock in Rio as part of the supporting tour.)

    It's not explicitly a concept album, but it very nearly works as one. And the album art is actually really fucking cool (Iron Maiden's album art is admittedly hit or miss cough Dance of Death cough).

  • Hmmmm that's tough.

    And I don't think I can properly rank them because I'm weird about ranking things. But:

    Master of Puppets
    Somewhere in Time
    ...And Justice for All
    Appetite for Destruction
    Fate of Norns

    That would do for top 5, yeah.

    After that,

    Dimmu Borgir, In Sorte Diaboli
    Kataklysm, Goliath
    Dio, Holy Diver Pantera, Vulgar Display Metallica, 72 seasons

    Yeah, I think that's a solid list based on a combination of just liking the albums and the fact that I prefer to listen to them in their entirety rather than limiting myself to a few songs off of them.

    Which, I could probably do 20 by that standard, and more than that if I included metal adjacent albums/bands like ac/dc. You know, the ones that ride right on that edge between metal and hard rock.

    And, truth is, when it comes to Metallica and Amon Amarth, all of their albums are like that at least sometimes. Like, the load/reload albums aren't where I always want to hear the whole album, but I often do. Same with Maiden there.

    I'm not saying I don't have favorite songs off of those albums, I do. It's just that I always want to hear the rest after I hear those lol. Justice and Master in specific, it's hard to not want to enjoy them the way i first heard them, with the songs flowing into one another as the album plays.

    • Paysage d'Hiver - Winterkälte
    • Immortal - Battles in the North
    • Sacramentum - Far Away from the Sun
    • The Ruins of Beverast - Rain Upon the Impure
65 comments