I just realized I left Dream Theater off my list. The shame!
Out you go, G n’ R. Images & Words at #10.
I’m apparently gonna be a heathen here…
Never heard Pantera until I downloaded “Vulgar Display of Power,” based on this thread.
Really? It’s fine. Was it revolutionary at the time or something?
Joe
Yes.
Yeah. It’s wouldn’t be a stretch to say it saved heavy metal. It came out in 1992- the same year that *Nevermind *turned hard rock on its ear. Now, at the time, it wasn’t a huge seller - it never made it into Billboard’s top 40 - but it basically defined the sound of metal for the rest of the 90s, the same way British Steel did the 80s.
Actually, the easiest way to point out its importance is to look at the next Pantera record. Far Beyond Driven debuted at #1 in the US and at #3 in the UK (where non-grunge hard rock was officially dead by 1994). In the days before the internet, the only way to get your record to debut at #1 was to have massive word of mouth about it, and the only way for a band like Pantera (ie, way too heavy to get any attention in the mainstream tabloids) was to have people talk about their last album for two years.
Insanely so. It was two years after Megadeth released Rust in Peace and Anthrax released Persistance of Time and four years after Metallica did …And Justice for All. It would still be two more years before Slayer released Divine Intervention and so it was an oasis of truly heavy metal that came after the Big Four had entered their major 1990’s decline. Despite the huge surge in the popularity of Grunge rock there were still plenty of metalheads out there, but sure enough Pantera held down the fort for most of the 90’s.
FWIW, The one time I saw Pantera play, they had another band on the tour with 'em. It’s too bad nobody from White Zombie ever made it big.
Fitting into your list something from Savatage - maybe Hall of the Mountain King
My personal list would need at least one Steppenwolf (7 or At Your Birthday Party) and at least one Dio (Lock Up the Wolves maybe)
Just for a bit of data, here are the ten most-played artists assigned the “heavy metal” tag on last.fm and their most-played albums:
[ol]
[li]Iron Maiden, The Number of the Beast[/li][li]Judas Priest, Painkiller[/li][li]Black Sabbath, Paranoid[/li][li]Motörhead, The Ace of Spades[/li][li]Metallica, Death Magnetic*[/li][li]Ozzy Osbourne, Blizzard of Ozz[/li][li]Manowar, Warriors of the World[/li][li]Dio, Holy Diver[/li][li]Megadeth, Rust in Peace[/li][li]Black Label Society, Mafia[/li][/ol]
This is just going by the number of tracks played, so there are a couple oddities, but overall it’s a pretty solid list. There’s also a list of the top albums overall, but it’s so completely dominated by Iron Maiden and Metallica that it’s not really representative of anything except how popular those two bands are.
*Master of Puppets has the second highest number of plays.