My all time favorite band would have to be Godflesh. Streetcleaner is just the heaviest.
My runners up would be: Black Sabbath, Slayer and Ministry.
Sometimes, though, I get into a new band and listen to them for a long time until something else catches my ear.
Lately, it’s been Opeth and Dimmu Borgir.
You’re being taken, dude. It’s a “sellout” joke. The four albums in question are Kill 'Em All, Ride The Lightning, Master Of Puppets, and …And Justice For All. Everything that came after are their post-sellout albums.
Anyway, I think that Justice is a tremendous album though it really could have used the bass that was intentionally mixed out of it (probably because it wasn’t Cliff but Jason, his replacement). The best song on that album is “Frayed Ends of Sanity”.
However, my favorite metal album is Pantera’s Vulgar Display Of Power, and the best song on it is “By Demons Be Driven”, followed closely by “Hollow”.
I agree, to an extent. To me, the only GREAT albums they released were the ones with Newsted. So *Justice, Load, the “Black” Album, *and Reload are my favorites.
Something tells me that you’re rather young.
The Metallica divide is almost exclusively age-based. The older fans universally love the early stuff and the younger fans favor the newer stuff. You have an interesting twist in that you favor the newer stuff AND Justice, though.
There is NO WAY that Load or anything that came after was better than their early stuff.
I suppose whether I’m young or not depends on the age of the person asking. I just turned 38 last month.
I think Newsted’s stuff is better. It’s not that I didn’t like Cliff Burton, or have an appreciation for his bass-playing abilities. I just prefer the sound the band developed with Newsted. YM, obviously, MV.
That said, Load had about 3 good songs. Reload had even less. Justice is my favorite of their CDs.
Let me add in a few, of what I guess I might call “melodic metal”:
Harem Scarem - Change Comes Around. I need to be careful listening to this one in the car as it tends to make me speed.
Allen Lande - Hunter’s Night. The whole album is amazing, layered and symphonic and yet nice and heavy.
Pink Cream 69 - Children of the Dawn. Dumb name, great music.
Gotthard - Anytime Anywhere. Not really metal, but a damn great hard rock band. RIP Steve Lee 
<stunned silence>
Anyway, Metallica has to win for best band, even though everything after Justice has been routinely horrible and just…not Metallica. Metallica broke up during the recording of the Black Album and were replaced by giant pussy pod people.
Best metal song? I reserve the right to change this at any time, but as of right now today I’m going with…Dissadent Aggressor since it works well as both the original Judas Priest version and the thrashy as fuck Slayer version.
Just curious as to how old you guys are. I hit my teens in the 80’s and started listening to metal around then, and have had most of the stuff in this thread on cassette or cd at some point. Now I work with kids in their late teens/early 20’s that claim that NONE of my music is heavy metal.
The stuff I still listen to:
Dio
Black Sabbath
Ozzy
Iron Maiden
Kiss (if someone’s going to claim AC/DC as metal, I’m taking Kiss :D)
Newer metal bands I really like:
Blind Guardian
Within Temptation
Rhapsody (now known as Rhapsody of Fire [legal issues])
and a ton of European style “melodic metal”, mostly fantasy based, like Dragonland, Legend Maker, Freternia, Hammerfall, Nighwish, Epica, etc.
Favorite song:
Nope, I’m not touching this one. I seriously doubt if I could even narrow it down to 50 favorite songs, let alone 10. One? Pffft 
I also tend to rotate music - I’ll “forget” about something for a while, then re-discover it. I’ve got close to 500 cd’s - not just metal but all types, so it’s impossible to listen to everything all the time.
Actually, at the time, diehard Metallica fans (such as myself) considered …And Justice For All the beginning of the “sell-out”, specifically the slow-paced song “One” It was their first video and received heavy rotation on MTV. The song also cracked Billboard’s Top 40 and the album the Top Ten which really irked Metallica fans who took pride in the fact that they were above pop charts, videos, and MTV.
Justice also suffers from terrible sound, if they were to remix the masters on that and release it as an album that doesn’t only play out of the tweeters on your stereo I’d glady fork over $20 for it.
But I remember when “One” hit Mtv and the next day school was awash in people with Metallica shirts on, and not just the usual crew of burnouts and metalheads. It was the day that they went from being “our thing” to “biggest rock band on the face of the planet” and just look what it did to them.
DOA, by Bloodrock
Laying here looking at the ceiling
Someone lays a sheet across my chest
Something warm is flowing down my fingers
Pain is flowing all through my back
[[shortened quote]]
Heyoka, in no way, shape, or form am I “junior modding,” but they generally frown upon quoting entire lyrics on these boards due to copyright issues.
Heyoka13, when you are quoting from a song, please don’t quote more than one verse. A link to the lyrics will do the rest of the work.
Sorry, forgot. There also seemed to be some question as to the precise lyrics on that too. I was swept up in happy remembrance of times long past . . .
Guess I’m stuck in the 80s too. I just love Thrash Metal, especially early Exciter and Armored Saint. Favorite song? Probably “Killed by Death” by Motorhead.
And yes, I did go out “like that” although Lemmy never drove his motorcycle through our living room wall. He just walked through the door like a regular guy.
Favorite band is a tie between Faith No More and Queensryche. Totally different, but equally groovy.
Favorite song could be totally different if I were in a different mood, but one that could come up at almost any time is Paradise Lost’s Embers Fire. The only one I’ve ever heard where the lyrics and melody are equally as good as one another is Priest’s Electric Eye.
Weirdly, my favorite Queensryche song is the one that sounds least like any other Queensryche song - Damaged, from Promised Land. It’s almost as though they heard a Pantera record and thought, “hey, we should try that”. It was never released as a single, and apparently filler for the album (to the point that I Am I, the preceding track, bleeds into it on the CD version of the album, though not the tape). But phenomenal, nonetheless.
I can understand that, though I have to choose “Promised Land” as my favorite on that CD.
I like that song too, but it’s not really metal, is it? I seriously considered nominating Queen of the Reich just for the gloriously awful video. Ah, the 80s.
I was tempted to type “Only three albums (“Kill 'Em All”; “Ride the Lightning”; and “Master of Puppets”) and an EP (“The $5.98 EP”)” but I felt that might be pushing it.
I prefer this interpretation of heavy metal history as well.
Exciter? Really? I knew those guys back in the 80s. They were one of those local bands that were “really big in Europe” but not many here really appreciated them.
Heavy Metal Maniac and Violence & Force are thrash metal classics!
Any love for Anvil out there? They’re having quite a comeback due to the success of their movie.