Finally... The Top 200 Extreme Metal Albums of ALL TIME!(results)

Among The Living is the Anthrax album thats gonna place innit?

Times Of Grace is still to show up a lot of peoples fave Neurosis

has any At The Gates placed?

if it did, tho I think SOD is more appropriate for *this* poll

Nile!

Gorgoroth?

christ i have about 40 albums i think will make it going into 20. some good shit is gonna miss out.

2 godflesh albums are certs, 2 slayer, 2 metallica, darkthrone,burzum, triptykon,frost, what else?

Liturgy

oh yeah immortal pure holocaust, mayhem - de mysteris, among the living, vulgar display of power, chaos ad. none of those could miss out

haha last years liturgy and krallice might sneak in with 7 high votes.

god this is impossible to work out but i cant see any of these missing out

any megadeth left?

haha its been staring me in my face from my shelf.... jute gyte - Ressentiment!

Cathedral - Forest of Equilibrium is gonna place surely

imago did you vote Arckanum - ÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞÞ?

wonder if Cannibal Corpse's issue is vote splitting, since there's a lot of variance on which the favorite is with that band...

damn. no Deicide. I hope at least the s/t makes it, but idk

Although I love Transilvanian Hunger despite some horrible racist lyrics, I'd never delved too deeply into Darkthrone otherwise. I've been listening to Under a Funeral Moon but I'm not sure that streaming it through my speakers does it justice. Probably needs to be heard on 32-bit FLACs through Linns to be appreciated.

i love Funeral Moon, though Blaze is my outright favorite.

think darkthrone need to be listened to on a broken cassette player in a hailstorm tbh

sund4r imo high quality audio is not going to help you appreciate Darkthrone. Under A Funeral Moon in particular is so shrill, it might actually help to hear it coming out of crappy laptop speakers. It's deliberately poorly produced, to evoke the same kind of lo-fi shrill-ness on the early Bathory recordings.

That said, what I liked about them initially, and what continues to draw me to them is that out of all the 2nd wave black metal bands, they retain the closest ties to traditional heavy metal. ie, their riffs (when you can make them out through the haze of terrible production) are from the school of Celtic Frost, Black Sabbath, King Diamond, Motorhead, etc etc. Above all, they're just a great *metal* band, regardless of how kvlt they were during their 90s heyday. So, if you're into that kind of thing -- boozy, adrenaline-provoking aggression/misanthropy/blasphemy -- you stand a good chance of being a Darkthrone fan.

Actually, I was being totally sarcastic. It's pretty obviously lo-fi.

I wonder what they make of it on the Steve Hoffman forums.

trolled!

sund4r could definitely have stood to conceal this unforeseen evil sarcasm ace for longer imo

Under a Funeral Moon is a must-have record for testing out high-end stereo equipment in shops. Sales clerks will respect you immediately and maybe give you deals.

I'm resigned to the fact that Filosofem will place probably - apart from any extraneous factors it's incredibly boring and responible for a million bedroom bm projects that mistake low fidelity and shit screaming for "atmsophere" and that's why I fucking hate it

"Under a Funeral Moon is a must-have record for testing out high-end stereo equipment in shops"

under a funeral moon and also brothers in arms by dire straits. those two are all you need in the hi-fi shop.

Play the blast beat on the MTV

Taking under a funeral moon in to a high-end stereo equipment shop should be mandatory just to annoy the staff into thinking something is wrong with their equipment

Btw I just listened to Obscura and I'd like to preemptively say that it belongs a further 20 places higher up my ballot

Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk so low at 42. Thought it would be at least top 20 for sure. Probably my favourite extreme metal album of all time.

^ Listening to this now. I can see why it's your favourite. So far it's managing exceptionally well to be both melodically intricate and completely brutal. It's great...

I'm listening to Super Furry Animals, but I suppose I'll switch to Emperor then *tuts*

xp i think it's the first black metal thing i ever heard. it totally confused me at first and i wasn't into it, but i kept coming back and really it's just THE big totemic BM album now. lots of trve kvlt fans will argue in the case of nightside eclipse, but this one has the perfect melodic/aggressive balance as you say, TT

I'm going to listen to it now as well. Whenever I need my Emperor fix, I tend to reach for their best of comp that came out c2003 and really does a great job of covering all bases. But yeah, first time I heard this album in a mate's smoky bedroom, I was convinced this music came from another dimension. I had no idea it was made by a bunch of Norwegian teenagers. They get the atmosphere down pat.

whoa this is excellent

Teenagers! You're kidding... I'm playing this aloud in an empty office overlooking London and expecting the sky to fully cloud over at any moment. The whistling sound on The Acclamation of Bonds was inspired.

they were really really young when they did the first album. Welkin is their second, so maybe they were about 18/19? don't quote me on that of course.

ihsahn was 21 when welkin came out, still fucking impressive

Ye Entrancepmerium does so much in 5 minutes. It's insane. As I say, when I first heard this album there was no question about it - this was ancient music made by vikings or demons or something - certainly not people who were only a bit older than me!

Yes, this was an amazing discovery!

Listening to Altar of Plagues' Teethed Glory and Injury now. Lovely dystopian atmospheres...will see how it progresses.

That's one thing that surprised me about extreme metal in general -- how young the bands were when they made their classic records. Most of the Swedish and Brazilian scenes were made of teenagers too, and the big American bands were in the early 20s or teenagers. It's weird how metal has this rep (outside of metal scenes of course) of being unintelligent music, because when you actually break down what these bands do compared to what you'd expect out of a regular old rock/indie band comprised of 20-year-olds, metal comes out way ahead in the complexity dept!

Does it still have that rep? Iirc, through some quirk of critic-logic, technical complexity was actually one of the reasons why classic critics used to regard metal as dumb. I definitely remembering reading scornful lines about "dumb virtuosity" or "the sort of song that boneheaded guitar mags would transcribe note-for-note" in negative reviews.

"classic" as in "older rock critics", not "classical music critics"

"I'm resigned to the fact that Filosofem will place probably - apart from any extraneous factors it's incredibly boring and responible for a million bedroom bm projects that mistake low fidelity and shit screaming for "atmsophere" and that's why I fucking hate it"

this album still sounds pretty amazing to me. and hating its influence is kinda like hating brian wilson for inspiring so much bad indie rock. unless you really do hate brian wilson, which is fine. i think burzum inspired a lot of GREAT stuff over the years. yeah, there is lots of boring bedroom stuff, but i think that DIY aesthetic was a quick and easy way for some talented people to make powerful music. especially if they lived in the woods and couldn't find anyone to play with.

filosofem also one of those albums where you can see what non-metal people see in it. compositionally, all kinds of musicians could get something out of what he was doing.

xp people confuse 'loud, fast and heavy' with 'dumb, meatheaded and aggressive'.

I definitely had a phase where I thought Anthems... was the better Emperor album but I've cooled on it a bit now. I still like some of it but the songs just don't have the impact they should for some reason, it sounds a bit too murky. I actually think the cover sums it up - looks more expensively-made than Nightside Eclipse but it's a bit hard to tell what's going on.

Does it still have that rep?

I think it does -- except that there appear to have been certain metal that gets a pass, like a lot of sludge/doom and new black(gaze) metal. Or, if it's not a stigma based on intelligence, there's still an aspect of traditional metal (whether heavy metal, thrash, death) that's treated as being outside of what most mainstream music publications would cover. And I'm not even sure that's a bad thing!

I blame Anselmo.

metal thrives on its own. like bluegrass. you don't read about bluegrass that much. and it was made by dumb hillbillies! but its hard to be good at it...also, see polka.