The Top 500 Heavy Metal Albums of All Time

Rating:
Summary: Popoff does it again
Review: As with his Top Songs book, Popoff clearly put a lot of time and effort into this mammoth undertaking. Thankfully, he has given metal fans an overview of what the metal community regards as the best albums of all time.

As for whether or not Popoff is biased.....he clearly is! He says so in his introduction. I mean he took the time to review every single one of the 500 albums. It's not like he will agree with every one of the picks made by those polled. Neither do I, neither should anybody...

Bottom line, this book points out the albums that have shaped Heavy Metal. Get it.

Rating:
Summary: Albums Popoff's friends like, not necessarily the top 500
Review: Disappointing at best. Writing is poor, and the title is misleading. Any book ranking Heavy Metal albums should not include Nirvana and the Sex Pistols. The proper title for the book should be "top 500 albums my headbanging friends like". With a genre stretching back 30-plus years there were a number of albums that should have made it in to the top 500. Further, the listings over-represent Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Helloween, as though the mid-late 1980s were the only time heavy metal prospered. And one final thought while I'm griping, Popoff includes almost every damn Deep Purple album, not, not knocking the band that wrote perhaps the ultimate metal riff("duh duh duhhhh, duh duh duh-duhhhhhh, duh duh duh, duh duh") but the rest of Purp's catalog is psychedelic-blues, not metal proper. Popoff should have spent less time on the stats of his polls and more time in an editorial role. The entries could have been shaped better, it would have been less "journalistic" and more of a book. And a book is what I paid for.

Rating:
Summary: Addendum to my first review
Review: Forgot to mention one very cool thing about this book: the addition of top 10 fave albums list from many, many famous metal and rock dudes. Gives a cool look into the minds of the guys creating all this din.

Also I like how Popoff shows the amount of votes each album got (well, somehow, in some convoluted mathematical way that we'll never understand); there's a lot of ties in there and it's interesting to see by how big of a margin the books beat each other. Man, the nerd-dom never stops.

One negative: we gotta stop calling Pearl Jam metal. Really.

Rating:
Summary: Sorry but last review deals with 500 Heavy metal Songs
Review: I apologize but my last review was made for the 500 Heavy Metal Songs of all time, also by Popoff, it was due to the resemblance between titles and covers that i commited the mistake.
I hope to have this one in my hands very soon. And I hope grunge to be here.
As I said in the review. Martin: Please stop calling your books heavy metal related, Try Hard Rock, Taking your words, that one is the real umbrella that covers prog metal, heavy metal, grunge, thrash, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent job by Popoff again,almost 5 stars, but....
Review: I would have given him 5 stars but i have some doubts about the way he made his"worldwide polls", I surely agree that Black Sabbath, Metallica, Iron maiden, Judas priest are the most influential groups in making Metal anthems, I even consider myself an 80's metallists and trust me I'm a Hard Core Sabbath fan. But, and this is the part where i retire a star from my rating if he dares to mix a lot of genres in his books. I mean if it were only metal OK- but again he includes hard rock, funk and grunge (this in a minor degree), Did Martin asked as many as almost 2000 of 30 something years old people in the world?. You'll see the heavy load of the "votes" lie in the 80's era. I mean where the hell are the new anthems? Nirvana is more than only "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Where are "Spoonman", "Crackerman" or "Them bones"?
Is really Celtic Frost above Pearl Jam, STP, Alice in Chains, etc?
Or was this poll made some years ago and now he finally takes the dust off his papers and made it public?
It would rather be titled "500 hundreth anthems of Hard Rock a.e.g.(almost excluding Grunge).
I recommend Martin Popoff to stop considering his books Heavy metal related. I think it's much better to tie them with Hard Rock.
He scares people who loves grunge, prog metal or simply Hard Rock. That is the real umbrella that covers all this genres.
Any way is a great effort with that charming Popoff style.

Rating:
Summary: One of the most idiotic "Top X" music books of all time
Review: Incredibly biased by the author's own twisted opinions, around 450 of the bands listed don't even fall into the category of "Heavy Metal". And how could Megadeth's "Rust in Peace" not make the Top 10 of his list?

The author's a quack, you can tell that by the book's God awful cover...

Rating:
Summary: Buy this man a drink before his hands fall off
Review: Keen eyes may note that Martin and I are fellow BW&BK-ers, but don't think that's the only reason why I'm always raving about his books. The man proves once again with this excellent tome that he has a great knowledge of metal, the history of it all, and most importantly to the task at hand, the ability to understand the vibe and feeling of an album. My only complaint here is I wish some of the album reviews/summaries were longer, much longer, so we could get further into analysis of the disc at hand. But alas, it's still a great read, propelled along by Popoff's off-the-cuff (and way outta left field) writing style, cool quotes from the rock dudes responsible for creating the albums and fun pictures. And the usual array of appendicies to further the dork-dom into the wee hours (and years).

Layout and fonts all look quite nice too, and, on a very anally retentive note, the typos are virtually non-existent this time. Which is good, because, man, I hate seeing typos in books. Anywho, this book has already fueled a few good discussions around my household, and is highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Solid compendium from one of Rock's best journalists
Review: Popoff is essentially a heavy metal Lester Bangs with a slightly boozier breath and attitude, but his scholarly approach to this genre is certainly well-respected amongst the metal cogniscenti and always welcome amongst what seems like mostly nothing more than high-gloss 'zine features on worthless nu-metal wankers and a flood of fly-by-night websites run by cranky Norweigans. As other folks have indicated, because this is a result of extensive external polling, there are a lot of strange inclusions into the top 500 (Pearl Jam? Bad Brains?) but - for better or worse - that's not really the point, its Martin Popoff using his extensive interviews and insight into the scene to help inform the shape of metal today as revealed by extensive polling from a collective of editors, musicians and general heavy hitters, folks whose tastes are eclectic and are definitely informed by even the most tangential developments of all things hard and heavy. This is why, for example, you see healthy amounts of grunge get voted on this list (which may have crushed metal in the early 90's almost as much as it informed and reshaped it) yet, not unsurprisingly, the two most metal of the grungers - Alice in Chains and Soundgarden - make the highest chart positions. And a quick survey through the very helpful, if terse appendicies shows AC/DC, Maiden, Priest, Zeppelin, Metallica and Sabbath all making plenty of appearances and keeping the charts mostly honest. Popoff's greatest and most charming conceit is his demonstrative love for somewhat misbegotten albums, and I think lots of folks will nod their heads in agreement whether or not he's excoriating their sacred cows such as Queensryche's _Warning_ or explaining why he really prefers Death Angel's _Ultra-Violence_ from their other plates. How do you know this man loves this music more than most mortals? Most of the album thumbnails are from Popoff's collection, and are autographed. The capsules from the musicians are very informative and conversational, which means that you get personal insight into many of the difficulties of making these albums and quite more often than not you get fun nuggets like Don Dokken being physically barred from the studio during the sessions of _Back For The Attack_ because of George Lynch's ego-posturing about songwriting credits, or Yngwie's 100% serious statement that his music is created not for "success...not at the expense of the art" yet somehow failing to address every album made past _Trilogy_. This is going to be huge fun for metal fans and "High Fidelity"-style music nerds. Next time though, I want the book centered around Popoff's personal top 500, where the full range of his love for the scene and personal eccentricities shine through. I think that will be a far more informative and valuable letter for the scene than this thoroughly enjoyable but somewhat disposable collection of abbreviated metallic vignettes.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Enjoyable Book!
Review: This book is based on the results of a massive poll. It contains reviews of each album by the author and most of the albums have commentary from one of the band members. There are also many top ten album lists from various metal musicians. Ignore the comments from the bozo who gave this book one star. He obviously did not read the beginning of the book which clearly states that these are not the author's choices but the choices of the people who voted. As for the reults, I have about half of them in my own collection. There are quite a few albums from band's with vocalists who sound like they gargled glass and could not carry a nursery rhyme, but in fairness I expected that. There are also some bands like Pearl Jam that I think should not be in there but again these are the results of people who love different kinds of rock music. I even had bands like The Cars, Styx, and Boston in the top 25 list I submitted. Anyways, this book is quite an entertaining read and I highly recommend it to all open-minded hard rock fans!