A Master List Revisited

 I've been thinking about this 15 year old list, recently.

A couple of unrelated friends told me in close succession - in the way that such coincidences often feel existentially staged - that this list (and the blog at large) have had a positive influence in their lives in terms of expanding their taste and orienting their own quest through the vast world of metal. That's all one can hope for, right? But it did made me wonder, how much of the old list holds up to my own scrutiny in the present?

We must be hard on the things we love, I've always held this to be true and so this is an exercise in pulsing, throbbing hardness, presented with all humor in the present and humility towards the past. Or is it the present that must be humble and the past that was hilarious?

Anyway, I'm going to go through the list and offer a comment on every album and see if I still love it as much as I did when I said 'this is my top100' 15 years ago. Keep in mind the taste that shaped the original list is more like a gestation of my teenage years so more than 20-25 years ago. Quarter of a century is a good point to take stock. 

Some things have changed, some poses will be exposed but then again, some things will never change. I won't neglect to say that this exercise (as this text is written after I have gone through the list) fills me with a sense of gratitude to even still be alive and aligned with the vector of my own heart to the extent that I can have this internal conversation at all. As much as I have learned to love all art and indeed hold on to that feeling wherever I can find it in this burning world, I am not sitting here pretending to be an expert on japanese micro-tonal electronica or anything. No, I am still the same metalhead I ever was, I look like the picture on the blog, my hair is still really, really, long, just a bit more white in places. Silver with wisdom and the sadness of a hopeless hope, let's say. Ah, to write my stupid purple prose once more, it is a pleasure.

And for you to read it. To say, to have an opportunity to share this with you, dear reader, be you an old friend or someone who chanced upon this blog just now, completely unaware of the personal weight of this archive of growth and questing within the astral zones of the grand heavy metal constellations. Perhaps you'll find a new album to keep you company in this life, or you're gonna go 'fuck yeah' at the melancholy fragrance of a rarified recognition.


The 3rd and the Mortal - Painting on Glass ✅

If anything my appreciation of the back catalogue has deepened over the years, however I still return to this album most for the absolute pristine trip it is. It will never get out of rotation, the delicate sound design and the emotional sensitivity of the songs, the quiet craft on display here is forever.

Absu – Tara ❌

No support for cowards and transphobes. There's a wide world of metal out there and black/thrash is in abundance. One would think that as some sort of 'grandmaster alchemist wizard' that's all about transmutation one would be on board with a person's journey to find themselves but, nah, the grand wizard is lost in the closet of ignorance. Fuck Absu *King Diamond-esque high pitched squealing*

Agnes Vein - of Chaos & Law ✅

I love this demo as much today and on the first day I listened to it. Shit bangs. Epic doom battle metal is of the champion eternal. Will I succumb to the forces of Chaos or bend the knee to the authority of Law? Sailor on the seas of fate, in the mists you wonder...

Anacrusis - Manic Impressions ✅

Perhaps a broader appreciation of the catalogue makes 'which Anacrusis shall I listen to today?' more of a happy problem to have but I can never imagine my life without these Sad Thrash heroes.

Anathema - Pentecost III (did 'Serenades' instead) ✅

Ultimately, early Anathema are an inconsistent band, hence the 'is it Pentecost, is it Serenades?' concern, here. 20 years later it's also 'is it the demos?', I'm afraid. The best way to look at it is that there's a killer double Best Of from the Darren White years one can customize for themselves and that's how to make peace with this visionary but also inconsistent outfit.

Annihilator - Never Neverland ✅

I'm never gonna live a life where I don't listen to this flashy thrash masterpiece, it seems. No change, some riffs are eternal.

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence ✅

To be fair I don't listen to this more of then than once a year or a couple of years but I never have a bad time with it. I have noticed how much I find following the wobbly rhythm section more the focus over time and that means there's a lot of depth to the listening experience. Blah blah Cynic - Focus also needs to be here but I listen to it even less.

Atrox – Contentum ✅

If anything I love this more 20 years down the line. It's one of my favourite, visionary mixes of 'atmospheric metal' and 'progressive metal' as they occurred exactly at that era of release. One of the last crucial offerings of a heavy metal genre in decline.

Autopsy - Mental Funeral ❌

Yeah... I kind of never willingly go and listen to Autopsy anymore even though they come up on shuffle once in a while. The band is great, the style completely robust (though purposefully shambolic), the best early death metal band in my estimation, I just don't necessarily feel like rotten meat and weed potatoes when it comes to death metal, I like my shit weirder.

Bethlehem - Dictius Te Necare ❌

I listen to this very rarely to be honest. It's not a mood I want running around in my head. The music is beautiful. Still have it on my hard drive so it's not an X but I have to say it's hard to recommend this to anyone.

Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath ✅

The day I don't wanna listen to this album is the day they put me in the ground.

Blind Guardian - Somewhere Far Beyond ❌

Surprising development! I don't wanna listen to Blind Guardian. None of it, not the early speed stuff not the hobbitcore shit not the operatic stuff, I find them, somehow, deathly boring. Something about the songwriting is completely off for me, or the emotional content disconnects for me. I've taken them off my hard drive and don't miss them at all. For a kid that started with thrash and europower as my taste base I sure as hell don't listen to any europower (other than the couple of records in the rest of this list we'll be talking about below) which by itself says something about me, the subgenre or something in any case. Do you listen to Blind Guardian on the regular, dear reader?

Bolt Thrower - For Those Once Loyal ❌

If I'm totally honest. Bolt Thrower is something that only comes up on shuffle at this point, but I haven't deleted them and I have a few albums from them, I just, apparently, never feel like listening to a whole Bolt Thrower offering no matter how good the songs are so that disqualifies them from this exercise for sure.

Brocas Helm - Into Battle ✅

Flying colours, this will never change. I do tend to reach for this album only but I like the other ones too, they're just sitting there waiting for me to go 'time for me to really get into more Brocas'.

Burzum - Hvis Lyset Tar Oss ❌

Haven't listened to this moron in a decade, not on my hard drive, nowhere near my psyche. Doesn't matter to me how influential or well-written the album is, I can sense the motive behind it all and over the decades I've become more sensitive to not turning my soul towards such. Fuck Burzum, no excuse for fascist sympathy on any level. This man single-handedly has been the worse influence on our genre in total.

Candlemass - Epicus Doomicus Metallicus ✅

I have this skull tattooed on my flesh and it wards off evil. I'll be put in the ground with a sleeveless, moth-marked Watchtower t-shir and on one shoulder is the c-mass skull on the other is the priest trident. HEAVY METAL

Carnivore – Carnivore ❌

Long since deleted. After I found out Petrus Steele was once a mouthpiece for third way artsy nazis and rubbed shoulders with the types of Boyd Rice and wrote for those fucking zines they put out about how 'the Übermensch' it was over. I live in this World As It Is Today, and I don't have any patience for these fucking cretins. Moving on.

Cirith Ungol - King of the Dead ✅

If anything this feels like even more of a masterpiece than it did when I was a kid. Absolutely ageless, ancient masterpiece. Thank you for the metal, Cirith Ungol.

Confessor – Unravelled ✅

I will keep screaming in the streets about what a masterpiece this album is and perhaps my single-person campaign will make this band put out a third album. I listen to this, like, every couple of weeks! I needs it all the time! THE SECRET IS DEATH

Coroner - Punishment for Decadence ✅

But not Punishment! The real masterpiece era for Coroner is Mental Vortex / No More Colour / Grin. But I listen to Coroner all the time and and my appreciation has only deepened when it comes to this band. They are so far ahead of the curve they still sound like they come from the future.

Dark Quarterer - Dark Quarterer ✅

This rules, it still touches me as much as ever. Epic metal truth and wisdom. Rare emotions.

Deaf Dealer - Journey into Fear ❌

Although this album is great and I still have it on my hard drive, it's, in the end, a power metal Iron Maiden kind of derivative and there are, I think, more interesting and weird and unique offerings that should go on my master list.

Deathrow - Deception Ignored ✅

SUPERMARKETS SELL US THEIR SHIT. More poignant than ever. I do have a criticism of this album which is it needed a Neil Peart-y kind of drummer to reach critical mass but that doesn't mean I don't blast it every couple of months and get inspired. What inspires us? Truth inspires us. The angst of reflective recognition.

Demilich – Nespithe ✅

I ain't never getting rid of this, and there's always a time where I need to listen to this and only this. Irreplacable weird metal masterpiece.

Depressive Age - First Depression ✅

But barely. It's interesting, I very rarely seek out to listen to D-Age with full attention, full album mode anymore. It's not that I don't love this, and I do rarely go back, indeed. It's that the atmosphere is too heavy for my soul, in the end. There's a very deep sadness to this Sad Thrash offering and the situation doesn't get any better on following albums. I would still recommend this album without a second thought to people who haven't listened to it because immersing oneself in this offers, again, a direct line to a truth unavoidable. Then the relationship may become scarcer.

dISEMBOWELMENT - Transcendence into the Peripheral ✅

There is nothing else like this in the whole wide world of metal music. Nobody has come even close. The juxtaposition of the blistering intensity of the music (fast and slow sides both) with the dreamlike, revelatory meditation in the themes and lyrics is, in a word, sublime. We bow down in reverence before the mighty dIS.

Esoteric - Subconscious Dissolution into the Continuum ❌

I don't really listen to Esoteric anymore, and when I do I play Metamorphogenesis – Dissident to people to frighten the shit out of them. I think the spell was broken when I saw this band live and their music was cheapened by being reproduced on stage. Never recovered, always think of the guitar dude with a Michael Jackson mic on his face when I hear them now, it hasn't helped the band has dropped off in quality with subsequent releases as well, Maniacal Vale was their last solid offering (augmented by guitar pyro) but that, too, was overlong and overwrought. In the end, Esoteric are eaten up from an internal ambition to be 'more than any other metal band' and so they become a gimmick band in the strangest way possible. I was quite close to this experience as a more 'edgy' teen, now it feels like a morbid masturbation session, mostly due to the quite empty-feeling lyrics. If this band has a point, it is happily beyond my interest to fish out from between their contradictions.

Evereve – Seasons ✅

Gothic metal masterpiece, love every song, amazed at the robustness of this offering decades later. Don't think I'll ever get bored of this.

Forsaken – Dominaeon ✅

But barely. I still do listen to this, it's got a special place in the doom canon, but I am also sensing something off in this band, some attitude that doesn't belong in a redemptive offering. It may have to do with the gnostic themes and the whole 'is god good? What if god is BAD?' which, of course, I understand as an interesting theme for metal but it's also, I don't know, an inconclusive air to this endeavor that gets swallowed up by big, epic Candlemass riffs, you know, the whole enterprise of epic doom metal itself has overtaken up the purpose of a lot of bands of this style. I fear 'telling their truth' was never a priority for Forsaken.

Fleurety - Min tid Skal Komme ✅

The riffwriting and moods on this are still enchanting to me. One of my guitar inspirations and one of the few things even tangentially related to black metal I still allow to ring loudly around my soul.

Fates Warning - Spectre Within ✅
Fates Warning - Awaken the Guardian ✅

I'll go even further and say Perfect Symmetry is another addition. I'm not even gonna try to write about Fates in this way, in short, in passing, as I write about everything else on this list. I will either write a proper article (or series of articles) on them or just forever hold my peace. The best heavy metal music had or has to offer.

Gorguts – Obscura ✅

I very rarely listen to this but when I do I am inspired. It's a hard listen, is all. There's no way I would introduce someone to what heavy metal has to offer and what death metal became without playing them this, though.

Heir Apparent - Graceful Inheritance| ✅

Absolutely, and I would say One Small Voice is not far behind. Only internal tensions (obvious even on the recording) stops the latter album from being an eternal masterpiece.

Helloween - Walls of Jericho / Helloween EP ✅

My first real heavy metal experience aside from the Metallica openers, it hasn't fallen off for me even a little bit. The only thing we could even call europower that I regularily listen to besides Planet E by Heaven's Gate.

Horrified - In the Garden of the Unearthly Delights ✅

Though the album is a bit uneven, in the way, ironically, Septic Flesh are also uneven. There's just something to the guitar writing and playing on this album that's really beguiling to me, I love the deep death metal vocal too, they conjure this mystical atmosphere. Somehow, the demo era is just as strong. Great offering.

In the Woods... - HEart of the Ages ✅

Yeah I don't anticipate ever losing my taste for this album. A strong combination of the more interest atmospheres of an otherwise morally bankrupt style and the graces of atmospheric doom/death. Some songs wonder a little bit, but on the whole I seek out this experience often and I suspect I'll never stop needing to revisit HEart.. shame about what this band became post-reunion. 

Iron Maiden - Iron Maiden ❌

Who am I kidding? I rarely listen to Iron Maiden.

Jag Panzer - The Fourth Judgment ✅

Though I suspect this may be a more nostalgic element to this choice than loudly proclaiming to the world 'THIS is the one you need to listen to'. Perhaps I should replace this with the Titan Force debut I listen to much more often and I get my Tyrant fix (and much more!). Perhaps Ample Destruction? The Panzer I return to the most is the first EP, for what that is worth.

Jester's March – Beyond❌

This is good and I like it but I don't think at this point I can find several other later finds to replace it on a list of my heavy metal essentials. Not every song rules on this album and for it to keep it place, they kind of need to, in this style.

John Arch - A Twist of Fate ✅

And I will add the rest of the Arch material that came out since, Sympathetic Resonance and the beautiful Winter Ethereal. Arch can do no wrong, seemingly and I'd even say in terms of what he offers in terms of voicecraft and composition he's stronger now than ever. It's only slight problems in the music itself (Matheos's purview) where I lay slight objections.

Judas Priest - Sad Wings of Destiny ✅

And of course to a lot of the Priest catalogue. The appreciation has only deepened.

Kinetic Dissent - I Will Fight No More Forever  ❌

Not really listening to this much anymore. I have it on the drive, but I don't think it needs to be on this list. Slightly more ambitious composition and a bit less Anthrax in the flavour would have done it. Their hearts definitely in the right place, though.

Kingsbane – Kingsbane ✅

And In the Name, the band they became, actually. Listen to this stuff often, love it, great songwriting, good motivation behind the music, rarified Fates-esque style that to this day sounds fresher than most metal music came to offer. One of the rare prog-band-to-grunge-inspired pipeline bands that actually made something good with the mix of inspirations, kind of like Last Crack or The Beyond.

Kruiz – Kruiz ❌

Rarely listen to this anymore. It's not that it's bad, it's actually very good.. it's that it's more of a curiosity that has an interesting story around it. Is it an eternal masterpiece? More for an obscurantist metal underground record collector, I fear.

Legend - From the Fjords ✅

Speaking of obscurantist metal... this album however sounds fresh and real to me every time I play it. I wouldn't part with it, no way.

Litany - Aphesis: The Sapience of Dying  ✅

I still spin this once a year or so and I headbang to it and single the (weird-ass) lyrics along with them, I love most of the songs, I think it's a great offering in a difficult style to do well and I absolutely would recommend them breathlessly to younger appreciators.

Lordian Guard - Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God ✅

Both Lordian Guard albums are undying masterpieces. In the time between the old list and now however William Tsamis has passed away and the music is released from his darker side, his chauvinistic and nationalistic proclivities. The Destroyer is dead, Long Live Lordian Guard.

Manilla Road - Crystal Logic ✅

There's good and there's evil and there's no in-between. We shall slay evil with crystal logic.

Master's Hammer – Ritual ❌

I don't listen to this. It's good, but it never feels like I want to listen to it anymore. So I have to be honest and strike it off my list, that's how it goes. I wouldn't be surprised if one autumn evening I am striken with cold sweat and run back to the blog to change this one back, though.

Maudlin of the Well - Bath / Leaving Your Body Map ✅

I have crystallized the core of my disaffection with Toby Driver music. I still love and listen to these two in any case. The mystery on offer is inspirational, it inspired me to shape my own music in a certain way so I can never pretend that it isn't close to my heart. The said core of disaffection is, by the way, Toby Driver's aura itself. There's a strangely self-involved thing going on here which becomes way more obvious the further down the discography of this – otherwise unique – composer one travels. Let's just say I don't want to listen to a lot of metal that doesn't accept itself as such but at the same time is obsessed with its own reflection in my regular rotation, it's a bad combo.

Mayfair – Behind ✅

And Die Flucht follows closely along, and the demo material. This is one of these bands that is very close to my sensibility and I still study them for inspiration.

Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas ❌

Deleted etc... I have no interest in black metal, black metal is an embarrassment to heavy metal culture and it was a mistake to follow the trail of blood to such perilous cultural conclusion in the first place. When will we be ever rid of the black metal blood curse? Black-metal-first metalheads (a seemingly inexhaustible, self-replenishing blight) are the worst kind of metal hipster, anyone who listens to crap like this and can't feel a Judas Priest song in their heart is not part of my tribe, I have no interest in their ridiculous scene and the less breth wasted on this crap henceforth the better. If this offends you, dear reader, grow some real taste in metal and, also, get fucked.

Megadeth - Rust in Peace ✅

Mustane's story is one of disappointment for sure. At this stage of the game he was an augmented human riding very high on the strengths of the rest of the outfit for sure and that's how this album survives the criticism that swallows all further material up to the point of total irrelevancy. This album rules though and I listen to it often, there's something very Brechtian-alienation to the Megadeth story that must be appreciated.

Mekong Delta - Dances of Death ✅

I ain't never stopping with the techno-thrash and this is such a good album by my estimation. Never has lost its luster, and there's literally nothing else out there that sounds like this. Fight-Fire-With-Stravinsky is quite the idea and we are indebted!

Memory Garden – Tides ✅

Yeah this album works on me as much as it ever did. I love this Solna style Power-Doom and wish there was a solid spiritual successor to this style because even Memory Garden themselves cannot do it. What a melancholic masterpiece. The only thing one could have hoped for was a little bit of a clearer voice in the lyric, but perhaps even a little bit of that swenglish flavour of it adds to the experience.

Mercury Rising - Building Rome ❌

I like this and I listen to Mercury Rising often to be honest with you but that's more the prog/power fanatic in me and in a serious list of the most influential-to-me and worth-listening-to-for-you albums I think this is not A team material.

Mercyful Fate – Melissa  ✅

Talking about A team. Talking about SSS++ tier immortal heavy metal masterpiece. One could listen to just this record only and be a 100% metalhead to me. No further comment.

Metallica - Ride the Lightning  ✅

Yeah, and sometimes Kill Em All, hah. It's that thing with people who started with Metallica where they tend to go earlier and earlier as they get older with the material of the band at hand. I do have to say though, it is Master of Puppets (the song) that is the immortal contribution, or even the Battery to Master 1-2 punch that opens that album that blew open a whole generation's mind about what is possible with metal music. But when I wanna listen to Metallica I listen to vinyl rip of Ride the Lightning so let's be real.

Moahni Moahna – Why ✅ lol

Morbid Angel - Blessed are the Sick ❌

For how visionary this is blah blah blah in my old age I will be absolutely truthful: Altars of Madness is the crucial contribution by the Vincent era and especially because it has zero Vincent 'flavour' to it. From there on I would much rather listen to Formulas Fatal to the Flesh than Blessed at this point. However all things being equal I could probably live without listening to Morbid Angel if it came to that because their influence has been so propagative in other outfits of note. Let's put it this way: if I didn't listen to them at all I would miss Altars.

Morgion – Solinari ✅

With a slight shock when I realized this this, one of my most favourite doom/death offerings is actually lyrically based on the Dragonlance series of books? WTF?! Definitely devalues the album slightly for me, I don't know if I can explain why to you if you don't immediately get it. I still can't live without listening to this a couple of times a year though, it's so good.

Mortuary Drape - Into the Drape ❌

Eeeh. I like Mortuary Drape but I don't reach for them. More a curiosity because of their extra-musical storyline and so on. They still sit on the hard drive, though. I thought when I was making this master list years ago I had a little bit more of a desire to be rounded in terms of genre representation than I do now. Without the evil goings on and the aura of mystery of the times, black metal of all sorts is not worth the canonization. Now imagine how it feels when those 'evil goings on' aren't even a cool edge to shape a personality around but an absolute embarrassment for metalheads now well into their 40s or 50s looking at a world succumbing to fascism.

Motorhead – Bomber ✅

I need at least some Motorhead in my life, the particular album from the first two decades doesn't matter that much, I just love the 'engine' of this band it doesn't even particularly matter what the riff or hook on offer is. Overkill is probably better but then again, Motorhead live were better than any other rock n' roll band ever, so there's that.

My Dying Bride – Trinity ✅ 

Let's be real, I will stop being a contrarian, the real choice is Turn Loose the Swans. Eternal masterpiece. It's just Symphonaire Infernus that holds a particular gravity for this listener and confuses the mind so.

Negura Bunget – Om  ✅

Yeah I listened to this again this year and it's still spellbinding. Naturmystic pagan metal of the mercifully atmospheric style without the stench of norsecore about it.

Neurosis - Times of Grace ❌

After recent revelations I have deleted this once important band to me from my hard drive and haven't looked back nor do I miss them, which I find honestly a bit shocking because Times of Grace was quite a unique and revelatory listen to me back in the day, when we didn't even know what hardcore is and we had dubbed this 'apocalyptic-sounding doom metal' in my friends group. Well, we all know how the whole post-metal story played out and what do we have to show for it? ISIS – Oceanic.

Nevermore - The Politics of Ecstasy ✅

I miss Wally every day and I do not want a Nevermore out there without him. This piece of futurist art is still sending us messages from the world to come.

Nigro Mantia - Poetry of Subculture ✅

I really like this demo still no matter how obscurantist-coded it is to put it on such a list. It's like putting Paul Chain's Alkahest on this list, which would be just as well to be honest. If you sue me you sue satan, it's not gonna work out well for you.

O.S.I. - Office of Strategic Influence ❌

Nah this ain't it. I still like this album a lot but it doesn't, in the end, cohere, it doesn't reward the depth of listening of decades.

Obituary - Cause of Death ❌

It's fun but it's uneven and it's a pretty meat and potatoes death metal album, in the end, with only James Murphy elevating it. More an artifact of my youth and it says a lot I don't have any Obituary on my hard drive anymore.

Omen – Battlecry ✅

But I'll be totally real with you. Something smells bad in Omen and I think it's JD's fault. There are some themes – I think it's best to actually refer to them in this case as 'fantasies' that are questionable to say the least and they drive the pathos of the music so it's not even a case of trying to separate shit from shit. I am well aware of this and there is an uncomfort about Omen I cannot shake, it's how I could have a Cirith Ungol tattoo or, indeed a Judas Priest tattoo but I wouldn't have an Omen one. There's just something that one has to be wary of in this fantasy of Omen.

All that said there are two crucial core experiences for me related to this band that I wouldn't be honest if I removed them from such a list. One is being 12 years old and being told by my metal elder that 'yeah when I wake up in the morning even though I'm hungry at school I don't buy lunch, I listen to DEATH RIDER and I eat the heavy metal instead, I save up my money to be able to afford another record!' which is as truthful as any statement as I've ever heard. The other is the fact that often in my mind it echoes when I have difficulties in life 'don't separate yourself from your dreams / do what you must to survive'. It is the credo I have lived my life armed with and I didn't hear it from my parents or peers or from reading a philosophy book, I heard it in a dumb Omen track. A dumb Omen track, at that, that's about anti-communism. This is very ironic, but that's heavy metal for you, those clashing contradictions. I carry that feeling that that bit of lyric and song gave me, regardless of the idiocies involved as a keepsake. It keeps me safe. So Omen stays with full knowledge of the shit.

Orphaned Land – Mabool ❌

Freedom to Palestine, the murderous regime must fall.

Paradise Lost – Icon ✅

Man, what a poser I am (was?). I almost never ever listen to Icon. It's Lost Paradise for me if anything. Here's a strange statement: Paradise Lost don't deserve to be on this list. Paradise Lost are a 'golden mediocrity' kind of band. Anything they did other bands did better, later. However. Paradise Lost absolutely deserve to be in this list. Anything other bands did they did because they listened to Paradise Lost and thought in their minds and felt in their hearts “I can do this better”. I am indebted to Paradise Lost.

Pik - The Heritage of Past Gods ❌

This is very good but it goes more in the obscurantist 'there's also this!' recommendation pile than on the immortal echelon, you know? I still find it very impressive and I listen to it once a year or so. It's interesting that such an album even exists.

Primordial - To the Nameless Dead ❌

Haven't listened to this since it came out and I don't think I want to listen to any Primordial ever again in my life. Fuck right off.

Psychotic Waltz - A Social Grace✅

Nothing has changed here, this isn't just top100 of metal it's top10, perhaps top5 for me. Enough said.

Queensryche - Rage for Order ✅

Similarily as above. This music still comes from the future. Nearly nothing I love in heavy metal would have happened the same without the influence of this album. I am in awe.

Riot – Thundersteel ✅

US Power metal with that melancholy edge of Mark Reale, sorely missed. Unfuckwithable, eternal heavy metal steel that destroys all pretenders.

Rosicrucian - No Cause for Celebration ✅

I remember the songs, here. I can sing hooks from this album on command. The solos are so erudite. But I almost never listen to it anymore. I reserve judgement, though as this feels like an album I'll just return to and fall in love with again later.

Rotting Christ - Passage to Arcturo ✅

If anything I love this even more than before. This collection of songs is so perfect I am sure even the band itself looks back and thinks 'how did we even do this?'. They had such limited means but somehow put this kind of enigmatic majesty together. Simply the best thing the greek scene has to offer in terms of the darker side of heavy metal that was emerging at the time. Calling this black metal in the Norwegian sense is ridiculous. 

Sabbat – Dreamweaver ✅

What am I gonna do, dethrone Dreamweaver from its place in metal history? It is as it ever was.

Sacrosanct - Tragic Intense ✅

Fuck yeah I still love this. Archetypal offering of the Sad Thrash category. Love the leads, love the lyrics, love the cover, love that this album exists.

Sanctuary - Into the Mirror Black ✅

Miss Wally every day. If I listened to this on vinyl I would be on my third copy by this point.

Savatage - Hall of the Mountain King ✅

I. FEEL. NO. PAAAAAAIIIINNN

Saviour Machine – I ✅

This album remains an absolutely unique offering combining the depth and melancholy of prime gothic rock with US Power lyricism and drive. It's a top20 album for me for sure and at times when I listen to it again alone in the dark of night and focus on the emotions and the lyrics it touches me as much as any art ever has.

Scald - Will of the Gods is Great Power ✅

This is still top3 epic doom metal artifacts, I listen to it often and I wonder what could have been.

Secrecy - Raging Romance ✅

Both Secrecy offerings and the demo material. A visionary and inspirational band to me. A picture of what heavy metal could have become. Waysided by their own complex ambitions and anguished relationship to truth.

Septic Flesh – Esoptron ❌

Eeeh, if anything, in the end it's probably Mystic Places but to be extra honest Septic Flesh are a double-cd Best Of band for me, all the way from the demos and up to Fallen Temple. What do I do with a band that hasn't put out even one completely consistent album and where I like all the songs equally, but at the same time has put out a song like 'The Eldest Cosmonaut' which I rate as highly as anything out there? In any case, this is a list of albums and not of songs, so Septic Flesh go in the 'consolidate your vision and try again' pile.

Shadow Gallery - Carved in Stone ✅

Talking about consolidated vision. I think Shadow Gallery are one of these bands for me that are 100% on the mark in terms of a playing a unique style I like (and one I didn't even think I would like as much, on paper!) and they go from strength to strength for, like, a 4 record span. Which puts them in a very high echelon of my interior pantheon. An impossibly good band. Another fallen metal warrior. We pay our respects.

Sieges Even - Life Cycles ✅

I fucking love this I bet in the whole wide globe I am the person that has listened to this album the most. That says it all. This album was made for me and my tastes and on a big part has shaped me so all I can do I say thank you.

Skepticism - Lead & Aether ✅

The time for Skepticism is not an often time, but when it is time for Skepticism it isn't the time for anyone else. A very personal & distant relationship. These are the life giving contradictions of heavy metal.

Slauter Xstroyes - Winter Kill ✅

Obscure as fuck and rightly rising above its station due to sheer quality. I love this and I will never stop listening to it.

Spiral Architect - A Skeptic's Universe ✅

Uneasy relationship with this one to be honest. On one had the quality is obvious. On the other, I don't wanna listen to this kind of thing by Norwegian overachievers that are slumming it between pay gigs for fucking Satyricon or whatever. On the other other hand an honest attempt has been made to push forward an envelope that felt like it would languish in abandonment at the time. On the other other other hand there's a Watchtower riff lift in here, so I don't know. I certainly won't ever delete this from the hard drive, for what that is worth.

Tiamat - Astral Sleep ✅

I have such a soft spot for Tiamat up to and including Wildhoney. Some of my appreciation is marred by a more mature understanding, over the decades, of what kind of personality is behind the lyrical drive of this band. There's this unpalatable essence of a heroin addict 'introducing' the dreamworld to like, female groupies in the mix here that makes me deeply sad but at the same time I can't pretend that I am not familiar with that longing for escapism (sans the drug) and how it talks to a core fascination of mythical and mystical heavy metal. How dark that story can be is once again, a matter of wrestling with contradictions. In any case on this era of Tiamat we aren't dealing with that subject matter, yet. The swedish extreme metal conception mixed with Mercyful Fate-isms for me a total winner and a big influence on me. I used to not like the vocal stylings in here but over the decades I could only wish more death metal vocalists had such unique personality.

Titan Force - Titan Force ✅

Ah, it is on the list! Well what is there to say? The classiest US Power offering on the list. A great roadtrip album, I break it out every summer.

Tyrant - Too Late to Pray ❌

Eh, it's cute but I think I was trying too hard, here.

Unholy - Second Ring of Power ✅

100% no doubt one of the more important, unique and challenging offerings in the atmospheric metal realm. Undying masterpiece, it will outlive any dissenting voice. We would be so lucky of more extreme metal had these priorities of startling individuality and depth as we see on display here. Sitting next to dIS in the thrones of power.

Varathron - Genesis of Apocryphal Desire✅

As mentioned in the case of Passage to Arcturo, this material to me is endlessly fascinating. Its circumstances of existence, the limitations it had to overcome to be what it is, the enveloping mood of the end result. In my mind perfect metal of the dark side.

Virgin Steele – Invictus ✅

Fuck yeah, Invictus! MIND!! BODY!! SPIRIT!! ALL ARE ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Vision Bleak – Carpathia ✅

This album is so entertaining and the rarified mix of gothy atmosphere with post-Metallica crunch, also deliciously coming from an Empyrium guy of all people? Endlessly catchy, fun King Diamond-esque fairytale about Carpathia, whose beauty is beyond compare!

Voivod – Nothingface ✅

And generally the Voivod catalogue has been the gift that keeps on giving for me over the years. Top10 album for me and it seems those retain their standing over the decades.

Warlord - Deliver Us ✅

As we said about Lordian, but Warlord are also even more significant because they're a foundational influence on nearly all the heavy metal bands that matter to the world – and on this list – that came after. From Psychotic Waltz to Mayfair to Xerxes, nothing else I love would be exactly what it is without Warlord carving the path. And as it often is with seminal bands, it's not just that they're influential, it's that the material is so filled with personality and unique vision often you feel like 'I need to listen to Warlord and nothing else'. The circus around the reunion of the band was unfortunate, but then a lot of the life choices of William Tsamis were unfortunate. As the Destroyer has passed, all glory goes to Warlord!

Warning - From a Distance  ❌

This is excellent and I would recommend it to anyone but I never listen to it. When it comes up on shuffle I skip it. The 'my gf left me' energy of this album is as real is it can be, but also in this way completely insufferable it turns out for this listener. One of the best albums I never want to listen to again.

Watchtower - Control and Resistance ✅

Obviously but I want to say that the recent remaster of Energetic Disassembly has allowed me to penetrate its mysteries and I listen to it like 2 times a week, sometimes back to back and my mind and heart explode with the promise of this futuristic metal. Top3 band for me and now burdened with the good problem of how to balance the fact that both of their albums are shoving their way into my top10. What more can I say about Watchtower? Perhaps without their influence my interest in heavy metal could have been passing, once. But with their challenging contribution they ascertained an eternal enthrallment in this listener, and many others. The promise of metal to come isn't to sound like Watchtower, it is to sound like no one else. If you cannot do it, STAY HOME AND PRACTICE. Practice what? The instrument? Perhaps. Or the mind. Or the soul. Practice poetry. Practice something else than whatever everyone else is practicing, you coward.

Windham Hell - Reflective Depths Imbibe ✅

Absolutely. Nothing else like this. W is such a strong letter in my list with just 3 bands. I wish Eric would have lived a longer and fruitful life and we could have seen this vision complete itself even more, but I cherish what we have in any case.

Xerxes - Falling Leaves ✅

And the first album and the demos. Xerxes are a perfect band for me, none of their shortcomings work against them. Their style is incorporated completely and their core is so touching to me. I feel like this band came to exist for just me in this world and that's a difficult feeling to ever find in this fallen world. I am indebted to them for every song they recorded.

Zephyrous - A Caress of War & Wisdom ✅

The funny thing is 'Towards...' is even better, in the end. The more I listen to it the more I love it. It's such an improbable thing to even exist, I love it so. Some of the best metal from Greece and some of the best atmospheric metal (???) ever made as well. One day the world will realize.

Zen - Gaze Into the Light ❌

It's not bad but there's no, say, Lemur Voice on this list and there's Zen? There's no Payne's Gray and there's Zen? There was much to learn for 20 yr old Helm and much has indeed been learned since. Let me tally up how many I've stricken out 

28 ❌! About a third of the list is off the list, isn't that something? Human beings are nothing if not a series of moods. The moods compound and what's left is bitterness, with a sideproduct of growth. I have in mind to do a future posting offering a few new favourites of the last 15 years but it'll take some sweaty time to narrow them down to ~30ish. 

As always I welcome your thoughts. I wonder who you are, and where you are. I wonder what you think and feel about this world. I wonder if we'll ever be free and I let my mind wander freely, this freedom will never be taken from us. Take care.

Heir Apparent - Graceful Inheritance

We may have never lived but we will never die, we are eternal and so, here we are again.

Let me introduce to a record from my childhood. Let's walk through the steps of how such a thing happened and how it is meant to happen again. If you know it and love it, give me a hug, metal sister, brother, or metal non-conforming, I salute you. Stay a while and read... be reacquainted through my eyes with a vision of your long-lost future's past. Fall in love again.

Let's fall in love, again.

If it is new to you give us a hug anyway, we're here as friends and we will part as comrades, you will see. Art has never lied and the truest steel cuts deep the vein of romance that will drown this world of utter lies, ah... you know the score.

Surely you hear the funeral bell by now, for decades it has been massing in the distance, this cacophony of anger...

Let's leave aside the rotting death for a moment and play a part in the summer bloom of love. The flowers are so fragrant, in heat the locust grinds away a madness all-encompassing, the mountain song is wordless, as if sculpture'd in air.

From the ancient ritual site of Dionysus I send you this lonely letter, and it reads:

Let me introduce you to a record from my childhood.




I got it on cd 10 years after it came out, which means the record cover has been absurdly shrinked from the LP original down to a little jewel case.

Did you know, dear reader, that it has been a long-standing tradition in the world of comic book art, back in the ancient times when humans read them on printed paper, for the artists to do the art at double the size of the intended print resolution and then have the art shrank down for the final product? They did this because it hid away imperfections and tightened the art on one hand, but it is also of another effect, the effect of miniature, of sharpened detail that invites the eye to look upon this Entire City all at once.

Comic books are a cubist medium by structure, you can follow the panels one to one in pleasing free jazz tempo, the languid sequence as it were, but at the same time you're also unconsciously always looking around... below, behind the current panel, the whole page you take in in furtive glimpses, you pervert. You're constantly spoiling the future and you connect it to the past, such is the beauty of the most ancient of our artforms of de pict ion, from an apeman hunting a mammoth on an ancient cave painting to Little Nemo and to whatever superhero crap springs to your mind now, the power to look at this, but also look behind it and ahead of it, all at once is a most ancient power. It grew our brains, it did.

So it is that the perfect format of a comic book is not so big that you cannot take the whole page in at once, it is, somehow, handy to make things small so that you may see them better.

That effect came into play when child Helm (Helmet, indeed?) came to possess this album, because the impossibly detailed and complex composition by artist Eric Larnoy, such a piece that would induce an LP appreciator to spend hours potentially, following every little nook and cranny of the grotesque and magical forms is all but augmented by the miniaturization of jewelification. It speaks to the fantasy therein before we even tackle the what-is-it-about-ness of it all, we are taken with the intensity and sharpness of the detail. Perhaps the music will match this ambition, a child would think.

It would be such cruelty to let a child down, and this is not a story about such, don't worry.

Take some time to look at the art and be transported back, years, to meet me in a small greek room. The fairest metal warrior of them all was still alive back then, he looked with pride and support to you as you perused this artifact of magical power. His echo never left us.

As to what-it-is, a horrifying duality confronts us. A conjoined twin – surely the work of a foul magic – wearing a kickass jacket to be sure, together but apart but of one transcendental, stitched together mind. He is standing in a passionscape of chiaroscuro, neither here nor there but surely everywhere you've been and felt a chill run up your spine.

A dead one and a live one, a serpent and a ring, a spider and a demon bat?! It has that je ne sais quoi energy of a record cover chosen after the fact for a selection of music instead of one explicitly drawn to the music and as such it is selected because of an existential concept that it matched to, not because of a storyline that needs to be exact and to the letter to fulfill its fantasy.

For me it is one of the perfect heavy metal album covers, then and now and I have indeed spent that hour looking at all the details. I must have been 12 or 13 then. I am 41 now. The form of an angel tops the bracycephalic, shared brain of the past and future twins, like an illumination that can only be resultant of thesis and anti-thesis coming together to produce... a thesithesis? I don't know these things very well you have to excuse me. What if I bang my head to this but also think it through? In any case we may not become any smarter today but wiser still is on the table.

Heir Apparent were here to tell us that heavy metal can be and indeed is much more than an one-sided affair. It is more than the sum of the parts, even! It's the music of the future, sans cliché. This is where, what we would come to call 'progressive metal', was also born. Q-ryche local to this Seattle scene paved the way. 'Tower in Texas an affront to every poser who thought in their puny minds we can draw a circle around what's wrong and what's left. Fates in Connecticut the effervescent soul of it all. They were all conjoining a twin of inspiration and aspiration in a similar manner. Though today relegated to the 'true metal' bin because it's old people with beer bellies and mullets that still listen to them, back in their day they were carving with force a new way through the hair metal of their contemporaries, tryin' to bring the message to you, and as such we must remember their pioneering spirit and not just how they conform today with a refurbished heavy metal immitation.

The label? Black Dragon records. Of Epicus Doomicus Metallicus fame, so much I knew. The time was 1986, but truly, the time is now. A black dragon, such a fearsome imagination!

The band is called Heir Apparent because they're here to collect their crown and the album is called Graceful Inheritance, for the crown must be passed on to them with all due honours and all social graces must be observed. 1986 is the defining year for everything we have ever talked about, dear reader. Have you noticed?

With age the paper seems all the more yellowed I notice. This ancient manuscript, what does it reveal? Well, as it always is this is a thing made by people and because we will all pass from this earth eventually, scripta manent.

Let us celebrate the people and have a little peek at their mugs before we let the fantasy unfurl. That was and remains a part of the experience. If the band took a band photo and put it on their stupid cd, we will look at this photo and make our judgments.

Ah, yes. Dress-shirt metal of the highest decree.

I see a vest, I see a skintight sleeveless, I see the perms. But I also see the steely eyed resolve, I see a band that isn't here to fuck around. Do you also see? I see young men that dedicated their lives to something utterly useless and it moves me deeply. If only I could through my persual of the utterly useless also inspire one single other human in this billion earth, it wouldn't be a waste.

Heir Apparent for this recording are:

Paul Davidson Vocals
Terry Gorle Guitars, Vocals
Derek Peace Bass
Raymond Black Drums

Also, if this band had a real budget they would have a photographer worth a shit to tell them that in this arrangement there's a visual illusion: it looks like scarf boy is holding the hip of vest man and vest man has his little precocious fingers of his reverse hand in scarf boy's belt loop. Do you see it? You're never going to unsee it now, you're welcome. What a strange thing, to both somehow find a couple of talented musicians with two left hands each and to have them touch each other so sensitively.

Enough fucking around, time to listen. You could listen along, or listen first, or listen first and then listen again as you read, whatever's your kink is fine with me, pervert.

The album starts En Trance, gettit? A wordless minor key fanfare of an intro, percolating in an air of mystery. Like gates opening, revealing to child Helm an altogether outer realm. Such an intro track feels like it's setting up an existential concept and not a storyline album. It's as if to say 'welcome to our world, leave all else behind'.

The introduction of the instrument tones and sound space is in a word elegant. There's no technical excess to it, it's restrained and short. A hooky chordal opening establishing the key we'll be spending a lot of our time on in this record to be sure. Given the emergent form of heavy metal relying on a guitar's lowest available open string tone, you'll often find a lot of any given album centers and wanders around that lowest tone. Heir Apparent are – and continued to be on their second album, it's no accident – a very airy heavy metal band. They're robust and tight as a unit but not so concerned with grinding your face on an palm chugged E note over and over the thrash revolution happening around them notwithstanding. The heaviness here is more of a theatrical weight, tubular bell ringing along with rhythm, bass, lead and cymbal in unison. Apocalyptic tolling, you are enthralled, pulled to the edge and then left to shimmer as we fade on to

Another Candle

From intro to intro, we gently glide, dreamlike from the gates to this oneiric plateau, punctuated by shimmering delay returns and chimes, soft and inviting. Today such elements of a heavy metal soundpicture get flattened down for there has been so much metal inbetween of every stripe, of every genre trying this and much more. But for 1986, for you having just bought this and for you playing it expecting the lightning bolt of Marshal steel, it is a fake out. The conjoined creature is given to such melancholic shifts, it gives it a soul and a longing. We haven't even heard a human word and we are already in a complex musical world. An inbetween place. And then there is a man, talking in harmonic parallel, in fact:

I've seen through times of mystery
And dreamed of truth in history
I can't imagine why we'd let our lives be stolen away
For armageddon

To be their pawns
And fear their gods
With no free will – No!

And the band enters into the metal gallop in earnest. Now with modern ears we can discern weaknesses when put next to aforementioned Q-ryche or a Fates in terms of the singing power, or in terms of production and sound design that could relate to us why this band is seen as an obscure entry, for die-hard enthusiasts as it were and not a band that put out an Operation Mindcrime and made a million... But if we set our modern ears aside and listen to it as if it's the only heavy metal record that ever was we will see not deviation but innovation of the form. I will briefly highlight the harmonic-heavy ornamentations of the guitar player – of his time surely a guitar hero of a sort – that here and on every song very clearly establish an identity that is unmistakable. When you listen to Terry Gorle play guitar you immediately know it's him not so much because of technical affectations but because of his chorusy tone and his compositional choices that always highlight these gestural mannerisms that come from an era of guitar playing where a heavy metal player of some accomplishment didn't seek to be a Swiss army knife of tricks and tones but instead to purely express one or two particular ideas at the full logical extent of their application. This is the best way to describe the guitar approach of this band: Terry, in rhythm and solo does just a couple of things, all of the time, but he does them to their utmost.

Heavy metal is inspiring because it isn't jazz fusion or classical music. It's inspiring because it is the overreaching achievement of regular humans wanting to play rock n' roll for the gods, it is exciting because you can hear the sweat and lust to materialize something useless in full force, something only a few thousand humans in the world would end up vibing with, but vibing with it hard. Terry plays for that crowd and he will until the end. His hand brings the soul to this band.

I don't know if Heir Apparent had misgivings because they didn't make it big, if there were inner arguments and band strife about how to commercialize their sound – historical anecdotes point to yes, mind you – but when it comes to the immediate riffery and tone and attitude of this guitar-driven power metal band from 1986 it surely doesn't come across as confused at all. It comes across full formed and confident.

The picture in the poetry is lucid as it is abstruse. It could be about anything but it isn't. It's about a real anxiety and a real foretelling. It is of consequence as are all the lyrics, we shall find together throughout the duration. There's the weltanschauung of a studied mind, young but studied. Confident enough to tell the truth, naïve to a fault, it's the voice of heavy metal circa 1986, a voice that thought the world would go much different but in reflection is not surprised it went as it did.

The band confidently hits their beats throughout the verse leading to a rousing, chorus-and-wah washed solo. You'll find every solo on this album to be absolutely memorable without ever devolving to brainless pyro. Heir Apparent didn't put 'grace' on the cover for show, they're cut of a different cloth in regards to their peers in american metal.

The song coalesces to a powerful coda verse with muscular drum and bass punctuation of every little emotive detail of the simple riff.

Desire – the lust for total joy
The fire – a world it shall destroy
And there's nothing you can do
Cause the world you've known is through


A perfect heavy metal song? An eternal staple. A song sang along to by the metal faithful again and again indeed. And we're only getting started.

The Servant jumps off with its arch riffery and loquacious soloing and young Helm was headbanging then and old Helm is headbanging (more carefully, neck issues) today. As we dovetail into the verse section the vocal comes in with such melancholy, Heir Apparent aren't a simpleminded band. You can say on its face an album such as this is about spraypainted wizard mural on the side of a van kind of theatrics but that'd be missing the (or a) point. The puppet show is a puppet show but the lead puppet is taken with these melancholy moods, often. The puppet play quiets down and there is a spotlight on lingering, small emotions, you know there's a human holding up the puppet, really and the human is letting you off easy. You'd be a fool to throw away this tension between this absolutely grandiose verse loopy guitar playing and the softness of this, ostensibly, power metal singer going on about a misty dew that settles down on this earth below, the winds of time are telling us there's no play for us to go.

We're on our way, alone.

Progressive metal isn't about Berkley chops. It's about this tension. It's the power metal band, stealing from Iron Maiden and Rainbow but to tell a human story, an inspiration to strike steel and melt the heavens in a cast that is abstract, it follows the crevices and frames our most hidden desires. It pictures us as kings propped up in our fantasy by servants – us, as well, servants to our own fantasy – we are the ones that sweat for this fantasy, we are the ones crowning ourselves for our useless achievement. We are the ones playing and the ones listening, this music was - and is - ours.

These are the emotions this song pulls out of me, then and now. As Icarus is falling to the earth surely there is a moment where the dread subsides and there is a stoic joy to this ending. To believe in your wings as they melt, to rejoice in life as you die. Icarus regrets nothing, he'd fuckin' do it again, believe it. I could listen to Terry Gorle solo the fucking phone book to be honest.

Two perfect heavy metal songs back to back... Slowly you begin to understand, as countless heavy metal bands and their various offerings start to observantly move aside for Heir Apparent is walking in the centre stage. That feeling, that ancient feeling: this is the only Heavy Metal band that ever was.

Tear Down the Walls slows things down and delivers another pristine guitar hook, supplanted by these ghost noted volume swells that feel like violins. This regal, yet melancholy feeling. Heir Apparent are very unique in this way, they don't surrender to the campy cheese of the Kingly metal thing like a Manowar would often do, yet they don't decohere in the other direction by a way of a confused, fragmented composition. There's such confidence and direction to this song, it's no wonder it's another eternal live show staple, another song sang word for word by regular humans at the top of their lungs, people like me and you. Because this song is actually about us, as it goes:

They dwell in a palace of ivory and gold
In beauty and comfort, a fortune untolled
Yet, out in the courtyard injustice prevails
They've turned their back on what lordship entails

They squander their riches on oceans of wine
The masses are starving while ministers dine
The bringers of Sorrow, the masters of Pain
Rise up in anger, let sweet vengeance reign

Tear down the walls!

So we see Heir Apparent are on a humanist crusade, an enlightenment borne through heavy metal steel. For decades in the interim heavy metal fell prey to the funeral of meaning of a globalized, neoliberal post-modernity. Reading lyrics is embarassing, so let's stop. Extreme metal is about a vague feeling of superiority, let's keep things vague because if you look too close it all falls apart.

For decades people would laugh at you for taking a heavy metal song seriously as if talking about the human plight of the downtrodden through purple allegory and Conan the Barbarian prose like this. But in 2025 looking back, guess who was right? That heavy metal spirit was right. It never lied. We had to grow up to become children again and realize that what we once felt was true was the only thing that was true and we spent our whole lives struggling for the wrong things. Art never lied to us, ours souls were just too small to accept it without some fingers crossed behind the back, without some sort of moral escape clause lest we are mocked for our simplicity of mind. With age comes the torture and from the torture the soul either withers or engorges itself with wisdom.

Unafraid, now, now that heavy metal has survived itself, somehow, and the world accepts the spandex as much as it accepts the double bass and hollering as part of the cultural milieu at large we headbang demanding more, we demand this human spirit, we demand a cry for justice even if it is the last naked scream that will percolate through a blasted nuclear universe, the last thing of value that humans had to say is right here in songs like this, dumb heavy metal songs by idiot savants, not a symphony, just a dumb riff and a rousing message that burns incandescent, still.

Running from the Thunder

This bar room boogie pace switch-up best serves as a backdrop for the guitar man to go wild, showing us the more Dionysian flavour of his playing. Old heavy metal records were not obsessed with keeping style consistent from every track because what they were selling was not a subgenre niche, they were conveying the whole thrust of heavy metal, ambiguous and open ended as it felt to them before it congealed into selected offerings for selected audiences. This aspect of heavy metal isn't easy to reinvent without appearing instead as some sort of post-modern circus music conglomeration of styles. For Heir Apparent, as they were of their age this is seamless and congruous, much like it would be for '70s Priest. Strong chorus about being filled with dread and inexplicable power. Every bar punctuated with some sort of guitar wailing, all propped up perfectly by an incredible rhythm section. Truly the power metal essence of this band isn't necessarily to be found in the guitars in the conventional sense, it is in the extremely lock tight and groovy pocket rhythm section where we see clearest the deliniation between older styles of rock and heavy and what we called USA-styled power metal. There's also an inventive key change in here for the musically observant, and at the very edge of this short song Heir Apparent threaten to take off, they just cannot contain themselves. That's my favourite part of this song even after all the guitar theatre, it's where the song lands of this threatening V and surges on its climax.

The Cloak

Another shorter one. It's actually interesting how fully formed the sorter tracks are on this album by this band that I squarely would place in the progressive metal originators camp. That's a thing they have on all their competition, these extremely catchy shorter tunes that work themselves out fully without ever feeling throwaway. Another killer, winding riff going into taut and gallopping verse sets up this morbid fantasy. When Heir Apparent do grim melodrama it acts as this beautiful foil to their more high minded ambitions on the signature tracks. This and another track down the line are some of my favorites from the 'heavy metal of the darkest night' variety of composition on offer on the debut.

Often I listen to this album and just follow the bass, it's so on point and it does the lion's share of outlining the harmonic movement as the guitar often is arpeggiating in a chorus sheen and building to a soaring solo from such foundation. Only Crimson Glory had an equally crucial bass element to their US power metal. There's been many others with a strong tone or chops, but that the songs so depend on the space given to the bass to propel the compositions is where I find Heir Apparent very unique.

R.I.P.

Ah, the heavy metal instrumental on side two... here, Heir Apparent return to that regal melancholy, painting a vivid tale without a need for a script. From the harmonic double led introduction to the beautifully twisty verse riff, this is one of the two guitar workouts on offer on this album. A strong Rush influence (there is no progressive metal without the seminal influence of Rush) rears its conjoined head, worshipping Dionysus and Apollo together, IAAA... mid-soaring in the verse riff, the power chord is pulled and we are plunged into this deep darkness of a soundscape. In an understated way, Heir Apparent here are providing a blueprint for motivic and suite-like composition as much as any of their proto-prog peers that could inspire many a contender for the crown. Much like the deep well in the middle of 'La Villa Strangiato' this is one of the highlights of this record that the listener's ear longs to re-experience. The attentive will be drawn into an otherwordly trance as the bass player gets a chance to lead us deeper and under floating pad chords and chiming spell... Terry blesses us with his most beautiful solo... often when in orgiastic mode I accept the solo as a wash of sound, but it's when we get a slower and more compositional extended lead line like here where I truly feel that feeling, as a guitar player you know it as well “I wouldn't change a single note of this solo, I wouldn't change a single bend or expression of his touch'. One for the ages, melting in controlled amp feedback, shimmering in chorus and that particular reverb... we do not make them like this anymore and when we try it's just a mockery of our own vacuousness of spirit.

This band, had they two guitar players would be tremendously diminished. I do not need a rhythm track propping up the solo work, I need just that punchy bass and Terry trading riff with lead with himself. It's exactly what the cover promised, this schizoid tension that in the end collapses into a brilliant, shimmering illumination. Pure steel but airy and inchoate. The riff reminds its dark majesty on exit and then the record needle scraches to awake us from this morbidly beautiful dream. A perfect heavy metal instrumental.

Hands of Destiny

Oh my god, how many peaks can this mountain range have? One of these perfect anthemic songs, in full splendour we again see this juxtaposition of glory and tragedy:

Yet in our abundant wisdom
Man can't tame the sky, the mountains or the sea
Held beyond our understanding, helpless to deny
The hands of destiny

For a heavy metal genre so taken with abject tales of shock and terror this is downright modern, yet in literary terms this is a point as old as The Odyssey. That's how Heir Apparent come off, that's why their style can both feel arcane and cutting edge. They understand rock and roll as a music that belongs to the people and so it should be thrilling, you know... the basic idea of the post-industrialization pop song, it's entertainment but it owes to people something more than that. There's not a shred of pretension to this and that's a very fine line to walk, to the point where a lot of listeners wouldn't necessarily place this in the progressive metal camp exactly because it's not self-absorbed in that particular way.

Keeper of the Reign

This is the other anthem back to back. Again the theme of melancholic regalia at focus. Much is expected of the first amongst men, a heavy burden to be king. The standout element of this track for me (beyond the endlessly singalongable chorus) is the romantic bass solo culminating in an extremely rousing coda that transforms the balladry into full-on power metal. The slow triplet, punctuated by the complete rhythm section is so classy, a stroke of understated genius while guitarman does guitarman things at full blast on top. Airy Heir Apparent only a couple of times on this album go full-on rocket fuel and as you'd expect this is a moment much beloved by everyone that has been to a Heir Apparent live show or listened to this record with any attention. If you're new to this, you're welcome.

Dragon's Lair

Back to the heavy metal of the night style, here. Impossibly great riff sets up one of the all-time greatest metal screams recorded on wax. Much like the Number of the Beast scream, once you've listened to this one you will often find yourself wanting to play this track just to listen to it again. Perhaps the vocal isn't as strong on the whole on this album at the impossible standard set by Tate, Dickinson, Dio and co. and, verily, Heir Apparent would try their luck on a second album with a more conventionally powerful throat on the mic but that's a story for another time. There are moments, though where the vocalist really gives it their all and this opening scream on this track is such a moment indeed.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa he goes and I am as excited about heavy metal as I've ever been. Time collapses to madness!

Looking through the windows to your mind
Can't you see that there isn't much more to find?
As you take the crystal deep within
Waiting for the magic to begin

And are the broken mirrors of your soul
Dying for a lesson to be told?
And will you ever find an answer there?
Daring to approach the Dragon's Lair!

Lurid melodrama and manic fantasy, a child taken by sojourns of the imagination. Songs about power, songs about darkness, songs about fear and dreadful joy. Heavy metal! The post-verse bridge juxtaposes again this particular brand of melancholia to the muscular verse rhythm. As usual with great heavy metal records, songs about dragons and such often betray a parable, here one about giving in to the worst vice. Chopping one's breakfast down a mirror as it were, daring to approach the dragon's lair, a rush that never seems to satisfy, tempting us once more before we die. Beware!

Masters of Invasion

This lurching beast takes a while to come together and groove, I always enjoy this slow start after the insaniac energy of Dragon's Lair. It settles into this bass pocket and a lyrical vocal outlined by a slow rhythm gallop. An Omen kind of feeling if you would allow. Though in the lyric one could pin the narrative to a particular war truly the crucial stoicism of Heir Apparent's approach broadly scrutinizes and condemns the inexorable inhumanity of modern warfare in general. The solo has this beautifully tense middle section that ups the tension before surrendering into itself again and returning to the sparse verse rhythm. When you think it's all over a coda solo soars as if to escape this madness, once again. A masterclass of understated grandeur and one of the best songs on this incredibly stacked record.

Nightmare

As we're nearing the end of the offering we are treated to another up-tempo banger filled with phantasmagorical visions. The only fault I can find on this album is the thin background vocal on the verse but even that is quickly assuaged by a killer bass break post-chorus that pumps me up every single time as it hits the solo. Once again bass player MVP on this track. As far as songs go that are about, broadly, 'nighttime is scary' this is a winner. This is another very short track that perfectly sets up the final statement of the album.

A.N.D. ...Dogro Lived On

For the life of me I have no idea who Dogro is and I haven't chanced on any interview material that would substantiate the title of the track (perhaps that can be a fun reader participation element in the comments if you, dear reader, know more than I do) but I have to say this is probably my favourite track on the album and the strongest all around statement on the debut, for a few different reasons.

First of all that segmented stop-starting riff is pure progressive metal majesty and I have tried to emulate the emotion such riffs evoke many a time in my own writing. That is to say a riff like this opens a whole new department in the mind thereafter from where many inspirations will come that are internally validated by enthusiastically the Ego confirming the base drive by going 'oh, yes, like the Dogro riff, yes! Yes!' and for that I can only be eternally grateful to Heir Apparent.

The way the rhythm section supports the mysterious riff with intelligent syncopation just melts me. You can imagine this band in fucking 1985 playing this in the rehearsal room and looking at each other with gold in their eyes it's so prime prog without a hint of affect about it... it's as if the riff tablature was found carved in a stone and there were parts rubbed off by millennia and that's where the band just opted to restart the riff over and over, mesmerized by the winding, menheiric gravity. One for the ages indeed.

What solidifies the approach here however is the lyric:

Face the facts of Life On Earth
The nature of Mankind
Pages from our past are now defined
Humanity has common sense
We all know right from wrong
We've lived in false pretense too long

RISE! RISE!
Face the facts of present day
RISE! RISE!
Rid yourself of ancient ways

Fear of gods and demons is the folly of your mind
Acknowledge facts of Science - don't be blind
The war of Good and Evil is what you create within
The Facts of Life are where the truth begins

RISE! RISE! RISE!

Prepare for your future - don't live within the past
The ancient cultures never knew the facts
Technology has given truth where myth had been before
It's time Humanity stepped through the door

This is where, in earnest Heir Apparent put their contribution forward to what they imagined 'a heavy metal for the future' could truly be about. Obviously withour Rush we wouldn't get here. We called it progressive metal afterwards and in our confusion we led it astray, but here it is, without much comment needed, honestly. It's 1986 and while the thrashers were still caught in a mosh Heir Apparent are conveying an altogether different worldview.

It isn't so much that I agree or disagree with the thesis, it's that I had, and continue to have a wealth of thoughts about it, passionate thoughts, complex and sometimes uncomfortable thoughts. That I sing along with it, I yelp 'Rise!' every time, puts me in a place where I am half-arrested, I am at a distance but I am in it at the same time. That Brechtian moment captured to be relieved for decades, the promise of heavy metal to me is right here. One can only hope to give a difficult but inescapable challenge like this to their listener in 1986 or in 2025.

Thank you sincerely, my dear reader, for listening and scrutinizing this old masterpiece with me. We did well, didn't we? Beauty only grows more beautiful as it grows old only in the sublime realm of art and all that will be left behind even after we are gone are these explorations of something that is of us but beyond us, it is of that other realm where a sound can be as a mountain, where a poem is as if it was never penned by instead always has existed. I wish to go to that place myself and spend a forever or two surrounded by these finer forces, indeed subsumed into them like I was never even here, because truly it never really mattered in any other sense that I was, but to become, once, solved inside the etheric alchemy of quintessent art.

I wish you well until we meet again.

Pirates of the Underground

 In the long and ill-considered term where old internet got subsumed into the grotesque corporatist conglomeration of 'web 2.0' services and when all the little useless homes of personal chronicle like this blog felt truly outmoded, people of our subculture struggled to recreate and retain their spaces with variable degrees of success on the new attention economy platforms.

One such small community is 'Midnight Lighting Steel.', a facebook group of 100-150-odd people, lovers of old metal, weird metal and unique metal all the same that I was part of founding. 

In this space over the last few years many topics were brought on for discussion and many an obscure metal gem was dusted off for re-appreciation. Interesting thoughts came out of seeing disparate individuals appreciate forms of metal and particular cuts that I thought were truly passé for the constitution of the modern heavy metal listener, but that's a story for another time. Suffice to say that even in this crippled state the promise of internet connectivity still inspired something new for me and others.

Web 2.0 being the cretinous machine that it is, however, it soon became apparent that even the groups internal oral history was getting lost in the obscurity of the near yesterday, as the search functions and, generally, the archival functions of the platform are pointedly inoperable, discouraging any sort of conglomeration of fact in lieu of an endless re-discussion. That's attention economy, isn't it? 

My mind rebels to that idea, especially when it comes to matters of passion and fetish; Surely we have talked about Secrecy before, right? Surely we have all listened to Last Crack by now, no? We can build upon an edifice, but how? How do we know what is worth bringing up and what's been enshrined in the certitude of fact?

The idea that new members come and go and old members forget and we can't simply fish out our own discussion out of a deaf-dumb archive set me to ponder on the kinds of ways we propagated metal wisdom in the older world, the nascently connected but not yet overconnected world. What is an attractive package, even for a very small audience, even better, exactly for a very small audience to remember and remind itself of its oral history? 

In the world of tomorrow no-one should seek to talk to the many, the many are deaf to the world of tomorrow. One should seek to talk to the few because the few can become a community that imagines freely what will come to pass.

In this sense, for Midnight Lighting Steel I sought to do a little bit of a pirate radio show. I do not want to be a 'content creator' for youtube, I don't especially want to have my face or voice on the internet at all to be honest, but I thought it a decent challenge to contain my generally extremely verbose brain on all things metal down to the radio show format, and to hearken back to a different standard of how we package and convey information on this style of art to each other all the same.

Furthermore I sought to be a living example of how 'we listen to music', in ways that to people of similar background and idiom to my own will seem obvious but to a generation of listeners fed by spotify and listening to music on a phone that mutes their song with a ding about a video ad will be a challenge. Offline hard drive of meticulous collection, record cover and lyric, year and country, genre and ambition, the lives of little humans given with such passion and steel dedication to a purely useless thing. The inspiration is to never forget them, so we as well may never be forgotten. To listen to music with love and to comment with wit, it is a simple thing to the loving and curious but fewer and fewer of us remain...

Ultimately, and this is no shame it is in fact the biggest ambition of them all, these are meant to be videos you put in the background that deal with something you dearly love with passion and mature understanding, to keep you company and give you a feeling of comradery while you have to work a stupid fucking dayjob or take a long car ride or just assuage the loneliness of a long night, here and there. Steel has always been there for us and I am paying it forward.

The videos were unlisted, they were meant to be seen by 10, 15 people tops. They were meant to incite small discussions and more than anything they were meant to do that one magic thing where when, say, Secrecy would come to mind for one of the viewers/listeners, the memory would also conjure up a comment, a bit of wisdom, something mentioned or something sparked in relation. A metal brother has already given years of life to thinκ of this, we learn from each other.

To assuage this catalogue fixation, the rateyourmusic wound of endless scroll and no papyrus of what the metal chronicle has become we need to get a little post-apocalyptic. A small human's story, an interesting anecdote and not too much more, an overarching theme and concept to this subcultural endeavor of metal, all of it dancing madly on a stolen radio-wave, hijacking a service meant for gross self-exploitation -- pirates of the underground, lightning, the speed of sound we will prevail


I did a few of these inward-looking radio shows for the group and then I thought since they're unlisted and they still fall in a hole of facebook groups backlog not easily fished out, I might as well give them a final resting place here, where all my other thoughts are, where my heart always rests, in the ethereal tomb of Poetry of Subculture: my most useless and in some ways my most cherished creation - and trust me, I've indulged in so much uselessness over the decades - satisfying the double credo of maximum effort and for no apparent credit. Levitating between the anonymity of the unlisted internet of yore and the data aggregative totality of the future, we soar the liquid seas of imagination.

As these videos are not meant for general use keep in mind they need not be circulated, nothing has to be made out of them, and I don't particularly want to think of them as media to account for in any other way than a measured discussion in this old world comment space. If you've found yourself here there is surely a reason and they're meant for you, instead. You understand this distinction and you know what to do with such information.

As always I remain your faithful correspondent, beyond time and space, amidst world-ending chaos and uncertainty. We met a long, long time ago and before this is all over we may truly never die.

The experience of listening to music consists of two seemingly incompatible challenges. If you watch a film without trying to retain the image of the past, that is to say, what happened so far in the plot all the while focusing on taking in what's happening right now in some sort of dreamlike stupor, it could be argued you're missing out, you're being lazy, you are in one way or another engaging with this artform wrong. Let us not dwell on the exceptions to this logic and observe the general rule, for now.

Similarly with reading a book. How often have your eyes glazed over as you read a sentence and you've realized you have lost focus and you have to go back and re-read the whole page to pick up the track. So to say, there is some sort of track, you are on the scent towards some ultimate revelation, such is the power of prose. Even a poem can bewilder the mind in such ways that it sends one back, back, back again, start from the beginning, hold in your heart this immensity.


Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress

The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.


Music is the one art form (aside from perhaps more abstract types of video art, which also usually most often employ the guiles of music) that welcomes your letting go of the past, asks you to forget everything about just a moment ago and carry on with the ever-unfolding present. I suggest that it also goes further than that: by form and function (the richness of this ongoing ever-present moment) it actually resists your nostalgia for the past. There is simply no time for it, and if a record makes you yearn for the song before as the current song sucks then it cannot be said to be a complete offering, can it? The most beautiful music wants to enthrall you with such an impossible promise: oh, you liked that? Well get ready for this. And soon after, all this will be developed further into that. Truly in music does the soul feel drunk with the whole of possibility. The drunk mind often returns in circles, in little spirals, projecting a weightless vector filled with sanguine humour, a morning of regret and then...

The dialectic completes itself in time. If a song, or album, or movement is truly beautiful we do not listen to it only once. The experience on the whole delivers us in a state beyond nostalgia, it makes one feel the deepest sense of melancholia instead. Oh, how I long to listen to this song again and again not because this gave way into that but because the experience on the whole was blissful. It lifted up the chains of time from my soul, the excitement was so complete, it was as if nothing bad had ever happened for a short spell.

When we listen to a song - or an album, or a symphony - again and again no matter how much the jubilance of the ever-present moment resists our plotting, we do chart, if not a course, a place. A geography. We create a map. In our 'anticipation of perception' we are longing and looking forward to beautiful musical events experienced before, and in our retraced present we are connecting our herewithin with what will come again. Music makes us long for a future on repeat. Music has very little to do with the past. Dionysus, drunk with wine and ready to fuck, as he has done a thousand nights before is longing for this experience that will inexorably lead to that one, he's not thinking of the experience of yesterday. What is the broader story that coheres as we levitate upwards from this orgy of lust in particular to hold in our eye this entire city?

No other artform is so 'repeatable' as an experience. Not prose, not poetry, not even painting (its closest relative in the realm of longing). Only music is engaging our ever-present now with a future we anticipate in full knowledge of its goodness and of its potential for perpetual revelation. Our past is just the totality of life spent seeking.

A deep love of music, not just of listening to songs but somehow charting their potential spaces through a deeper connection, through a ritual of repetition, through this annihilation of the past is a high sign of innocence, that something in the heart is intact no matter how they cut at you. The monad is love.

Finding oneself listening less and less attentively, not for signs of the past but for how this moment connects to future moments, moments well forecasted but never fully and completely described (as the potential of the future is limitless) is a sign that cynicism now rests at the throne of want. A heart made of clay, hollow to the touch, reverberation empty.

Take out an album, do nothing, truly do nothing but listen to it, read the lyrics, memorize the moments that are to come, touch the future potential. No spotify, no cat videos, no other distraction to your excitement for this present moment reaching to the beauty of the next. Well forecasted, you know the movement of the seasons in this realm, even though you can never predict what new will be stirred in the subconscious by the inchoate and dreamlike motions of the clouds.  

The Final Hour

Heavy Metal told me we are nearing some sort of end, a long time ago. You heard it too, the tolling of the funeral bell.

We had a a little bit of fun with it, huh? Sad fun, but fulfilling. Sometimes I read some of my past words, but what kills me are the comments.

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for ever talking to me.

I don't know if you know, but in Greece, deadly terrain and cruel waters often get nicknamed with fairly positive sounding names. This simple dialectic irony is more ancient than any other human thought because it is driven by the most ancient feeling we have.

An edge of a cliff where women and childfolk were driven to suicide rather than be captured by invaders may be named 'the hill of the beautiful daughters'. A sea path that crushed the ship of many an Odysseus might be curiously dubbed 'the fair chance passage'. You get the drift, but do hold on as it gets treacherous...

Heavy Metal is like that, but in reverse. It pretends to be about terrible things, but it Negates the thesis. Ostensibly we were inspired by the darkness and horror packaged within a safe aesthetic experience because it was a containable darkness and horror. We glanced, sideways, inside the wound of existence and we headbanged. I have no regrets on that front, I think we did well, friend.

However a realization is dawning upon humanity now that cannot be assuaged through crayon blood ablation and tough guy leather biker poses on the back of the jewel case. An end to what we perceive as our world seems to be emanating its premonition with an undeniable, existential certitude. 

The end is demanding recognition, and the only way a demand for recognition plays out is, ultimately, with a master impressing their truth on the servant. We won't headbang our way out of a climate apocalypse but I am sure we will try.

I'm not going to presage the disaster to come with the classical fetish of the hobbyist writer (purple prose, I'm talking about purple prose) there's enough warning & admonition in any of yours, mine, our favorite arts to cover the issue a thousand times over. Perhaps I may be allowed to use my own poetry, only once, I hope you will forgive me  - but otherwise, yes, there will not be a 'top 10 heavy metal songs about the apocalypse' running in the background while we discuss. 

 If anything, I want us to look upon ourselves, curious and full of wonder, and to notice the phantom scars of a myriad of 'false endings' we have headbanged our way through, full of dark exuberance. I want us to contrast that to this oncoming demand of recognition of the true end of things. It feels different, doesn't it? As meaning falls apart, there is bitter and there is sweet, but one is fleeting and it's the other that we'll have to hold.

Or, perhaps I have nothing to really say, I just wanted to write a little bit, a little bit of unstructured poetry about how it feels to recognize this dynamic, myself, but not alone... I want to turn to my subculture - perhaps that's all that this was ever about, a child Helm, feeling lonely on top of the head of a 40 year old man. 

I wanted to tell you that I am thinking about meanings. I am sensing the end of the road for the human experiment, I am contemplating the thing no human was ever equipped to shoulder... but yet, collectively our total function is to shoulder... this, right? We wanted to be free. This is our meaning.

You'll help me one last time to work this out a little bit, why not? It's just me and you in this room, at this point. 

Since it's just us, I'll tell you this: I am certain you feel it too, I don't have to explain it too much to you. You heard the funeral toll a long time ago and your heart was filled to the brim with that emptiness. A power from nothing, a freezing flame, a rotten seed of undead vitality. You headbanged the head away until only steel remained.

We told ourselves that meditation on the toll of the funeral bell will make us strong, and make us prepared. The black metal nazi wizards are still on this vain and futile kick, invoking belial and tiamat and psyduck and begging for dark power to destroy...  no Goddess will help a creature so pitiful that it masturbates to the stench of dying children. 

But the nazis aside, the ones we will meet in the street, again, and have our turgid passion play out once again... we, on the other side, we were just eaters of culture in a world in moral cryostasis after world wars and holocausts and massacred godheads... we leave behind our defiant freedom from everything but ourselves.

The rest will happen as it happens and we will do what we will do, in a way that cannot be stopped or changed.

As the tension waxes and our meanings fall, I recognize you and make no demands, I hope you will remember me, also